Amazing Palette Color-Cycling Images

[RevEng]

If you have an interest in the creation of pixel art, you should check out Mark Ferrari's GDC talk about "8-bit & 8-bit'ish" graphics. Mark worked on graphics for many well known Lucasfilm games, like Zac McKracken, Monkey Island, and Loom.

 

 

In the session he talks about various works he made that are animated *only* by means of palette color-cycling. The effects he pulls off are amazing - flickering flames, realistic water distortion, etc. Mind blown. I'd embed an image, but these really need to be viewed with the colors cycling.

[Trebor]

That's pretty phenomenal to have such an eye and foresight to envision making those effects work with just palette color cycling. The only place I could 'pick' it out was under the "Winter Forest - Snow" scene. The snow cascading down a couple of trees follows the trunk's pattern alternating between a brown and white; only really noticeable because I knew what I was looking for.

 

In the other images, I could not readily interpret the pattern(s) being followed by the color cycling. Really incredible and thanks for the 'active image' link. Indeed, they need to be viewed that way, it's just awesome.

[+SpiceWare]

Watched a little of it and WOW - that single picture (start at 11:40) was amazing. Hard to believe that just changing the palette would switch the view between forest, up in the clouds, and cityscape, and each with coloration options for different times of day.

 

Plan to watch the rest this evening.

 

Addendum:

 

forest

 

clouds at night

 

cityscape

[zzip]

NEOChrome on the ST used to support animation by color cycling. I remember creating my own animated waterfulls using that technique

[Thomas Jentzsch]

Starting at 4:05 he describes his reasons, why he still loves doing 8 Bit.

 

Which pretty much align with my reasons doing the Atari 2600 and 650x assembler.

[RevEng]

Starting at 4:05 he describes his reasons, why he still loves doing 8 Bit.

 

Which pretty much align with my reasons doing the Atari 2600 and 650x assembler.

This part resonated with me too. There's two sides to this idea. First there's the side that Mark discussed, that limited choices can give rise to creativity and action. I think this idea has utility beyond limits in console architecture - if you impose limits on your game with theme and backstory early on, it can lead to similar increases in creativity.

 

The flip side to Mark's idea is well summarized by a Raymond Chandler quote I've always enjoyed. "There is no success where there is no possibility of failure, no art without the resistance of the medium." If you play a blocky video on a modern system, most people will see it as an ugly result. Do the same on the 2600, and many who understand the limitations will see it as artistic. Working with and around the resistance elevates the result.

[phoenixdownita]

The effects are great but generated on a palletted 256 color mode (8 bits).

 

The Amiga 1000/500/2000 topped at 32 colors (5 bits) from 4096 (excluding HAM mode and HalfBrite, both of which don't exactly support simple color cycling), the Amiga 1200 with AGA chipset was introduced in '92.

 

So I agree those pics are awesome I still think there's a little mix of old tech (the color cycling) and new tech (256 out of a larger palette + blending), you can read his own words about the blending effect. I believe it would require a SuperVGA level of card to achieve (maybe the std VGA with its 256 colors out of 256K colors would do but at the time ['87] it was limited to 320x200 that's why a SVGA would be needed ['89 onwards]).

For blending alone you need more than the chosen 256 colors obviously as during the transitions instead of moving the colors in step you need to generate the intermediaries (unless already in use somewhere else in the same picture), the bigger the available palette the better the blending, so you need 2 tricks: the color cycling and a change in the color palette to obtain well behaved intermediaries.

 

Incredible achievement for sure just that I doubt it would have been possible as is until the early '90 (and maybe that's what the author refers to anyway) .... still awe inspiring effects albeit to be fair it's mostly water effects and a few crackling flames which are somewhat very amenable to this kind of animation.