[HN Gopher] The curious case of retro demo scene graphics
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The curious case of retro demo scene graphics
Author : zdw
Score : 335 points
Date : 2026-03-30 05:27 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.datagubbe.se)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.datagubbe.se)
| charcircuit wrote:
| >It's a place of refuge from the constant churn of increased
| efficiency
|
| Increased efficiency also seems to be part of its appeal. The
| limitation is you can't increase efficiency by just upgrading
| computer specs, but instead have to find innovating ways to use
| the existing resources as efficient as possible to make something
| great. These kinds of optimization or compression problems seems
| like something AI would be very helpful for, so I think it is
| premature to try and ban its usage.
| jackdaniel wrote:
| This is quite tone deaf - demoscene stands for creativity and
| resource constraint, and using ai cancels both in favor of
| resource intensive cognitive offload
| Reebz wrote:
| Not knowing the scene and only what I took from the article -
| it's precisely this. There is a reverence towards human
| labour and effort that affords relaxing what are generally
| accepted social contracts in other areas (e.g. copying). It's
| a very interesting social construct where the self-policing
| is in a very specific are whilst other areas are forgiven.
| cess11 wrote:
| The demo scene is obsessed with hardware and tooling.
| Exhaustively knowing how things work and showing practical
| results as evidence is the main activity at demo parties.
|
| You can crib techniques from other people but unless you also
| show that you understand them deeply, e.g. by creative
| adaptions, you'll still be considered a lamer even though your
| results match those of someone else.
|
| This is one of the reasons why the demo scene still has a lot
| of physical events, it's part of the socialisation process to
| be in the same room as other people, putting in your final
| touches while they observe and produce distractions that in
| practice validate your abilities and respectable refusal to
| take shortcuts.
| zyx321 wrote:
| AI would be helpful for finding innovative solutions?
|
| Are you talking about some sort of hypothetical future Super-
| AGI?
| charcircuit wrote:
| Even brute force from something like autoresearch could be
| able to find ways to squeeze out extra space by trying
| different ways to express things and rewrite it.
| mda wrote:
| In the Lazur's 256 colour rendition, it is curious that they got
| the details in the front very well but messed up the third guys
| face completely.
| weinzierl wrote:
| To me all the faces look messed but I believe it is mostly
| because the image seems to be distorted, it is stretched in the
| vertical direction. I suspect it was created on hardware with
| non-square pixels and is just displayed wrongly.
| andai wrote:
| I was curious and took a look in an image editor. It indeed
| fits much better with y axis scaled down 15-20%
| exo762 wrote:
| If look good if you look at the image in original resolution.
| Click on it.
| pixelpoet wrote:
| As it happens I'm just on a train to Airbnb with large group of
| demoscene and fractal art friends, full week ahead of the
| Revision[0] demoparty! Hells yeah
|
| My top pick for pixel art would be anything by Made of demogroup
| Bomb, don't have a good link to hand sorry and need to change
| trains etc. Also check this amazing pixel art book:
| https://www.themastersofpixelart.com/
|
| [0] https://2026.revision-party.net/
| pavlov wrote:
| I have two pages in this book (Saffron/TBL).
|
| I made the images in Deluxe Paint when I was 16-18 years old.
| It was a lovely surprise to be contacted two decades later by
| the author who wanted to print them in this beautiful book
| among many far more talented artists.
| Razengan wrote:
| Oh man I wish I could have cool friends
| pocksuppet wrote:
| Go to Revision and meet some
| cess11 wrote:
| See if there are any events close to where you live.
|
| https://www.demoparty.net/
|
| https://demozoo.org/parties/
| imiric wrote:
| Those books look amazing! *_*
|
| Snatched the collection. Thanks for mentioning it!
| customguy wrote:
| Here you go! https://amiga.lychesis.net/sceners/Made.html
|
| That whole site (and more) is worth checking out of course. My
| favorite pixel art image at the moment is this:
| https://amiga.lychesis.net/sceners/Facet.html#Facet_SamTakin...
| kilpikaarna wrote:
| Made is still active in the demoscene and creating art for/with
| (the restrictions of) old platforms.
|
| Check https://m4de.com/?tag=archives
| myth_drannon wrote:
| There are also Editions64K books https://www.editions64k.fr .
| But it's more Amiga scene oriented.
| JetSetIlly wrote:
| > Farting around with Amigas in 2026 means actively choosing to
| make things harder for the sake of making things harder. Making
| that choice and still outsourcing the bulk of the craft and
| creative process is like claiming to be a passionate hobby cook
| while serving professionally catered dinners and pretending
| they're your own concoctions.
|
| People wanting to explore the use of generative AI for vintage
| computers is happening not just for graphics but for code too.
|
| I think in the case of code though, it's still interesting
| because I don't believe there's been any success yet. I hear of
| people having success with Claude in contemporary settings but it
| seems to fare less well when working for older computing
| platforms. There's a reason for that of course and it's worth
| exploring.
|
| However, it will cease to be interesting as soon as the first
| person manages to create something substantial. At the point, the
| scene should probably shun it for the reasons stated in the
| quote.
| roygbiv2 wrote:
| There's definitely been success in using generative AI for
| vintage Computers. Just the other day I got it to produce a
| bootable floppy for my Amiga 1200. It loads the network driver,
| uses BOOTP to get an ip address, connects to a server and then
| downloads code via UDP that it will then execute. I doubt
| you'll get it doing amazing graphical scenes like you see in
| the demo scene though.
| JetSetIlly wrote:
| I really meant in the coding realm, but it's interesting that
| it created a bootable floppy. That wouldn't be trivial.
|
| Questions: 1) Which AI platform did you use? 2) Did it create
| a binary image of the floppy disk (an ADF perhaps)? If not,
| what form did it take?
| roygbiv2 wrote:
| I used cursor with a mix of Gemini 3.1 and opus 4.6.
|
| It referenced the Amiga ROM Kernel Reference Manual,
| appendix C to create a boot block in assembly. It's a raw
| sector-mapped image, the build process creates a blank adf,
| which then writes everything at it's fixed offsets and we
| go back with another tool to patch the bootblock with the
| right checksum so the kernel accepts it.
|
| I copied that adf to the A1200 so I can then write it to a
| real floppy.
| amiga386 wrote:
| > That wouldn't be trivial.
|
| INSTALL DF0:
|
| Just type that and your disk is bootable.
|
| What I find mind-boggling is the handwave over the rest.
| "Loads the network driver" - ok, which one? There's no
| standard network driver, only a specification for writing
| drivers (SANA-II). Was it a driver for SLIP/PPP over the
| serial port, or a PCMCIA Ethernet adaptor, or something
| else? Was it a copy of a driver someone's already written?
|
| Also, it would be madness to try doing this _in_ a
| bootblock, or insinuating that the bootblock did it. Demo
| bootblocks take over the hardware and start using their
| loading routines, eschewing the main AmigaOS, and that 's
| the implication of saying something was done in the
| bootblock (you have under 1KB of space so the first thing
| you need is your own loader).
|
| What's much more mundane and normal is a _standard_
| bootblock which returns control to AmigaDOS and lets it run
| the startup-sequence, whereupon you can use normal files,
| libraries, devices, including a full suite of other people
| 's networking software, including BOOTP (AmiTCP comes with
| a client) and TFTP (see Olaf Barthel's tftpclient:
| https://github.com/obarthel/amiga-sana-ii-tftpclient). But
| it stopped being the "bootblock" that did it as soon as it
| started AmigaDOS.
| jamiek88 wrote:
| These people literally gods to me growing up. My parents were
| poorer than others so we never had any computer better than an
| acorn electron but the demos my friends with amigas and Atari
| ST's showed my blew my mind.
| krige wrote:
| It's hard to get in the era of ubiquitous 32 bit color depth, but
| back in the day, part of the show was making merely your hardware
| output picture very close to the reference in as many colors as
| possible and good resolution too. This was where Amiga's special
| video modes could really shine.
|
| Thus, some demos, like the one where Lazur's image came from [0]
| were just slideshows of very colorful images that were more than
| likely traced from something.
|
| [0] https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=3715
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmhffwhGiK0
| Findecanor wrote:
| Demo scene graphics competitions these days tend to include work-
| in-progress images, as evidence of originality.
|
| The Revision demo party is soon. From the competition rules for
| "Oldskool Graphics" [0]:
|
| > Include exactly 10 (ten) working stages of your entry. All
| entries without plausible working stages will be disqualified.
|
| Yikes...
|
| The rules for "Modern Graphics" [1] and "Paintover" similarly
| also require work stages, but fewer.
|
| [0]: https://2026.revision-
| party.net/competitions/oldskool/#oldsk...
|
| [1]: https://2026.revision-
| party.net/competitions/graphics/#moder...
| Sharlin wrote:
| Was required back in the early 2000s already, but that's not
| really what the article is about. It's talking about derived
| work created by recreating another artist's existing work in a
| different medium. Being able to provide WIP material is only
| evidence that the technical labor is yours, not that the
| artistic concept is original.
| parasti wrote:
| Focusing on "copying" seems like missing the forest for the
| trees. There's the copyright angle, but copyright laws are
| unnatural obstacles designed to give the original author some
| control over what happens after publishing. They're not
| fundamental, we made the laws.
|
| What is fundamental is this: every artist starts out by copying
| the works of others. It's how you learn.
|
| And in that framing, once you publish your derived work, there is
| only one question that arises - if you don't credit the original
| author but sign your own name, you're fundamentally misleading
| your audience. Your audience implicitly assumes you made the
| thing. Maybe you made 95% of it, but if you don't give due
| credit, it looks bad once your audience discovers that.
|
| On more than one occasion my perception of an artist has shifted
| once I discovered the "brilliant work" they created was actually
| a remake of somebody else's brilliant work. It's a feeling of
| being misled. It's never a feeling of "wow, this guy is a total
| hack and has no ability of their own".
| darkwater wrote:
| > On more than one occasion my perception of an artist has
| shifted once I discovered the "brilliant work" they created was
| actually a remake of somebody else's brilliant work. It's a
| feeling of being misled.
|
| The spirit of the famous - cited in the TFA as well - quote
| "great artists steal" is exactly that. If you don't know that
| the inspiration came from somewhere and believe that what an
| artist did was created in a vacuum, you will certainly think
| much higher of said artist.
| keyle wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| They wouldn't copy each other for copyright infringement as
| much as it was a mark of respect. They carried each other's
| arts as an evolution and respect towards each other rather than
| copying; all bringing a small twist on what was before.
| Asooka wrote:
| This sounds so insane to me. If I own land and grow a tree on
| it, the tree and its fruits are private property forever (mine
| until I die, then inherited by my children, then their
| children, or sold, transferred, etc ad nauseam). At no point
| does the tree become "public", that would be utter nonsense. It
| is property. Why should my ideas then be anything different?
| They come from my head. I own myself, including my head, thus I
| should own the fruits of my head like I own the fruits of my
| tree and they should remain property forever. The fact that
| copyright expires is one of the great tragedies of modern life,
| though at least I can take solace in knowing I own my ideas
| until I die.
| mrob wrote:
| Unlike the tree, nobody can take your idea away from you. You
| retain possession of your idea even if somebody copies it. It
| sounds insane to me to think you should get permanent control
| over other people's communication just because you had the
| idea before them.
| Lerc wrote:
| Perhaps, but that is your tree, if someone takes a cutting
| from your tree and grows it into their own tree you shouldn't
| own that tree, your tree is still there.
|
| Eventually you get to the point where someone asks why the
| tree is theirs and they say it's because someone in history
| planted it, they were a relative, so it is mine now. It is
| hard to assert a moral justification for long term hereditary
| ownership without inviting investigations on how it was those
| ancestors came to have the resources that caused the
| ownership to begin.
| vidarh wrote:
| Copyright law exists exactly because it is universally
| accepted that ideas are not property: Copying an idea or
| expression of it does not deprive you of your ideas.
|
| The entire notion of "intellectual property" is the creation
| of an artificial monopoly rooted in very distinct and
| separate goals from physical property that requires separate
| laws if you want to restrict copying or exploitation, because
| property law explicitly does not cover them.
|
| Most copyright laws are also justified implicitly or directly
| in the legal texts allowing them as creating an incentive for
| the advancement of the arts and sciences - a temporary
| monopoly right _granted_ by the state as a _deviation_ from
| perceived "natural right" - on the belief that granting that
| right creates more benefits _for the public_ than not having
| them, by encouraging the creation of more works.
|
| And no copyright law protects your ideas. They protect the
| specific expression of them. Patents - which do protect ideas
| - are by design far more restricted and limited exactly
| because they are far more invasive in depriving the public of
| use of the very idea for the duration.
| danparsonson wrote:
| Did you spend your entire life in isolation from the rest of
| human society? Because if not, then you have been influenced
| throughout your life in a multitude of subtle and not-so-
| subtle ways by the works of others. In what way, then, are
| the fruits of your head entirely yours? We're all standing on
| the shoulders of giants.
| cess11 wrote:
| Such a weird take. What are the similarities between your
| fantasies and land that to you make the philosophical
| convictions involved in private property laws applicable to
| those fantasies? Why isn't it good enough for you to
| fantasise about land and a tree, and why doesn't the answer
| to this undermine your reasoning?
|
| Personally I'm not convinced by the arguments for private
| property, which makes your comparison even weirder than you
| likely intended.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| > if you don't credit the original author but sign your own
| name, you're fundamentally misleading your audience
|
| Even that has its limitations, because otherwise nobody would
| be able to draw references. The challenge is always where to
| draw the line.
| aditmag wrote:
| It would be so awesome to make a cartoon today using original
| techniques with hand-drawn scenes, multiplane cameras, and most
| importantly jazz music :)
| shevy-java wrote:
| > Pixel artist Lazur's 256 colour rendition (left) of a photo by
| Krzysztof Kaczorowski (right). A masterful copy showcasing the
| sharpness, details and vibrancy achievable with pixel techniques.
|
| Well - the edited image looks clearer in the rendition, but also
| more fake. So unless that was the goal, I prefer the more blurred
| image, simply because it is more authentic than that digital
| edit. Many AI images have a similar problem; they look very out
| of place. I noticed this in some games where AI generated images
| are used. The images look great but they simply don't fit into
| the game at hand or they have a style that looks alien. Case in
| point was mods for the game Baldur's Gate 2 EE, where these
| images are great but they look very outside-ish. And that's a
| problem that seems to be hard to get rid of from such generated
| images, at the least for most of those I saw so far.
| cess11 wrote:
| It was done in 1995, and likely not as an edit, but as a hand
| pixeled replication.
|
| https://demozoo.org/graphics/28620/
| skrebbel wrote:
| Let's not forget that most of these pictures were made by
| teenagers, doing the best they could (and hoping others didn't
| know about Boris Vallejo). The demoscene was very young back
| then. Copying is generally considered pretty lame in the
| demoscene these days.
| _the_inflator wrote:
| Exactly. 12-16 was predominantly on the producer side.
|
| The hidden deciding factor nevertheless was time. And that
| affected the whole production cycle: coding, graphics, music,
| crunching, copying, spreading (postal services!).
|
| We had way more snow back then and we enjoyed working on
| something for hours till the wee hours.
|
| 18 was a deciding factor because after that military service
| killed quite a few scener careers.
|
| Have a look at all the pr0n stuff pixel graphics that were
| cherished by the young studs as well as all the scroll texts as
| well as early disk magazines or pictures of programmers in
| computer magazines, with lots of profanity and simply stating
| age competition: 14 years old scolding 13 years old...
| Sesse__ wrote:
| > Copying is generally considered pretty lame in the demoscene
| these days.
|
| You will still see plenty of e.g. SID covers of existing pop
| music, without anyone really batting an eyelid.
| skrebbel wrote:
| Fair. Pretty lame tho.
| Sesse__ wrote:
| That we can agree on.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| At least they know who to cite, even if they don't. I
| like to have a diffusion model generate an image of my
| desired subject in whatever media I choose then look at
| it as make something close but not quite the same. I'm
| copying tons of people I don't even know. But I am also
| just practicing and don't try to pass it off as my own
| creation.
| momocowcow wrote:
| It was considered "pretty lame" in the 90s, yet the best did
| it. It was just harder to figure it out.
| vidarh wrote:
| A _lazy_ copy has of course always been lame, but it also
| depends on when in the 90s, and the platform.
|
| There were plenty of images that amazed me back then even
| though I was perfectly aware of the source material. It
| depends on the platform, and the amount of effort going into
| recreating it. Reinterpreting an image for a C64 or Amiga
| with a restricted palette is a skill in itself. Copying it
| for a platform, or in a style / resolution / bitmap depth,
| where you might as well use a scanner, not so much (and so,
| of course, the accusations became more and more frequent,
| often warranted).
|
| Copying it and trying to pass something off as original is of
| course also very different from acknowledging the original
| and letting the conversion stand on its own as what it is.
| itomato wrote:
| Making something appear digitally that only exists in the far-
| away analog world still gets 'em.
|
| If it's indistinguishable from the real thing but made without
| any of the traditional tools, it's remarkable, even if you
| think it's lame in any way at all.
| onion2k wrote:
| I grew up in the era of the Amiga and got into computing in some
| part due to demoes like Technological Death and Unreal. Not sure
| if 10 years is too new to be considered 'retro', but "Intrinsic
| Gravity" by Still is my favourite demo ever. It's lots of
| different scenes that transition beautifully from one to another:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZxPhDC-r3w
| bob1029 wrote:
| I like the case of video editing. This is a situation where
| oftentimes zero percent of the source material is your own
| creation. Most would still consider this an artform. Shaping the
| overall meaning of a pile of raw assets is usually way more
| valuable than any one asset in isolation.
|
| Successfully integrating many disparate parts has always been the
| big ticket item. Dealing with the rough edges and making
| different ideas play together nicely is where all the value lives
| in most businesses.
| andai wrote:
| On my device, low res versions of the images are displayed, I had
| to click them to open the full res versions -- which I very
| highly recommend!
|
| e.g. I zoomed in to view the matchbox texture described in the
| article, and found it a blur. (Clicking loads the uncompressed
| PNG.)
|
| Personally, I think for this page, loading full res images inline
| is warranted. The resulting 3MB page size would be more than
| justified :)
| layer8 wrote:
| This is stated under the first image: _All images on this page
| are clickable and link to non-lossy versions when available._
| The aim is to not have large amounts of data be downloaded by
| default.
| richrichardsson wrote:
| Not sure I agree with the final takeaway point. At least from a
| personal standpoint anyway. I used AI images in a couple of Amiga
| intros, but actively admitted to using them. At the time there
| wasn't quite the backlash against their use, so now would
| completely steer clear, but not having access to a graphic artist
| is reflected in the output I've managed in the recent times
| (zero).
| cubefox wrote:
| That's was a great read and I agree with the author. Though to be
| honest, I don't particularly like the type of Amiga pixel art in
| the article. That is, pixel art with relatively high resolution
| and relatively high color depth. Everything looks too smooth and
| hyperrealistic in my opinion.
|
| I think things can look much better for pixel art that is either
| very low resolution (e.g. the small characters and objects in a
| SNES game, which would usually be just a few pixels wide, so
| every pixel has to be placed deliberately) or has a very low
| color depth (a pallette between two to ~16 colors, like the
| backgrounds in a PC-88 game), or both (like the sprites in a Game
| Boy game).
|
| An example where higher color depth can ruin the visuals is
| "Snatcher" by Kojima. The backgrounds for the original PC-88 and
| MSX versions were relatively detailed (200x100 pixels perhaps),
| while the color depth was very low (8 colors?), which greatly
| accentuated the pixel-art look. However, the later re-releases
| added more and more colors and smooth gradients, which only made
| it look worse, like a mediocre comic book.
| kilpikaarna wrote:
| Man, this really brings one back to discovering
| https://gfxzone.planet-d.net/ sometime around 1999 (when this was
| already fading into the past because the scene was dying, PC with
| 24bit graphics and painting software pushing out DPaint andAmiga
| palette stuff etc), reading all the old interviews where "No
| Copy!/?" was a core issue and looking at the galleries.
|
| "Danny leaves the scene" (because it's just a bunch of kids with
| scanners and he's got a job at Eidos now) never forget!
| djmips wrote:
| This is a lot of fun to check out. Thanks!
| imrozim wrote:
| the attribution point is the real crux. the demo scene actually
| had a strong culture of crediting influences and techniques
| greets, shoutouts, releasing source code. the copying was open
| and celebrated. the problem with modern inspired by work isn't
| the copying itself,it's doing it silently and letting audiences
| assume full originality
| myself248 wrote:
| My recollection is that the .MOD tracker music scene was the
| same. Credit your samples and nobody bats an eye! Be seen as
| "stealing" a sample, and you're persona non grata. It's really
| that simple.
| momocowcow wrote:
| The famous spinning head from second reality is directly taken
| from the book "How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way". Check it out
| on page 72
| tom607 wrote:
| Nice video from the Ahoy channel on his recreation of a pixel art
| burger that I think offers a really nice insight into the process
| for creating images like these
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4EFkspO5p4
| bowsamic wrote:
| If only the demoscene wasn't so horrible culturally. It's
| absolutely full of old sceners who have "earned" being dicks to
| people, and unfortunately many newbies who think that the way to
| be a real scener is to copy that behaviour. The constant
| flamewars on pouet.net are embarrassing. It is a good reminder
| that the internet did not used to be a nicer place though
| Lerc wrote:
| I would contest that choosing not to reveal the use of AI is due
| to an agreement of the nature of the behaviour. In an ideal world
| that could maybe be the case, but I think the driving force
| behind secrecy is harassment.
|
| There are those who use AI as part of their process proudly, but
| secretly, because they know they will receive abuse.
|
| I really wonder how some people think of themselves as artists
| while simultaneously attacking another persons choice of self
| expression.
| fao_ wrote:
| > I really wonder how some people think of themselves as
| artists while simultaneously attacking another persons choice
| of self expression.
|
| Because AI art is not art, and rips off existing artwork in a
| way that is more than learning from the style and imitating.
| Lerc wrote:
| Why do you get to proclaim what is and isn't art? It is a
| topic that has been debated for millennia.
|
| Almost every respected art form today was birthed to cries of
| "That is not art"
| itomato wrote:
| GenAI tools absolutely suck at pixel art from my experience.
| They can mimic aspects of the look at the display layer, but
| they are fundamentally bogus.
|
| Sprite animation in particular is bad unless you build a
| bespoke engine to spit out sequential PNGs.
|
| A poser will give, but not withstand (and internalize)
| critique. An artist is too busy producing or suffering to care.
| Lerc wrote:
| > They can mimic aspects of the look at the display layer,
| but they are fundamentally bogus.
|
| The same could be said of a lot of retro themed games. They
| frequently do not adhere to the same requirement such as
| number of colours per attribute cell. Nevertheless, they are
| producing a style that they are aiming for.
|
| But I agree that GenAI tends to suck at pixel art. It will be
| interesting to see how much that changes. More importantly
| poor quality art is still art, and frequently making poor art
| is the first step towards making great art. You don't have to
| like or applaud things you don't feel are very good. It is
| just not kind or useful to attack the artist.
|
| >A poser will give, but not withstand (and internalize)
| critique. An artist is too busy producing or suffering to
| care.
|
| This is my sense as well. The bulk of the aggressive
| behaviour seems to be coming from people whose identity
| values that they can produce things others cannot. Those who
| like just producing things are still just producing things.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| > Theft from the outside world, however, is often taken lightly -
| especially when it comes to graphics.
|
| One should not forget where the demoscene is coming from:
| crackers. The whole point of "intros" was to show off the skills
| of whoever cracked a piece of software. So obviously, the views
| demoscene held on intellectual property are not mainstream, if we
| can say it like that.
|
| The shift to a more creative and law abiding art scene, led by
| adults and not rebellious teenagers is more recent development.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| I think very initially it was indeed so, crackers were the ones
| doing the intros. But very quickly the efforts got split, most
| of the time, the person doing the intro was a different person,
| the person doing the music was another person and finally
| another person was the one doing the actual crack. I don't
| think it took very long for this split to be the norm, even
| though very early I'm sure there was individuals doing all
| three pieces alone.
| ebiester wrote:
| They were different people, but they were in the same group
| and knew exactly what it was being used for.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Yes, of course, I'm wasn't trying to claim the
| music/graphics was stolen by the cracker, or vice-versa,
| just that "show off the skills of whoever cracked a piece
| of software" isn't really accurately representing how the
| team's composition was, since they were different people.
| Jare wrote:
| I don't know about "recent"... demos for their own sake had
| clearly splintered off of the cracking scene by 1991, 35 years
| ago.
| qingcharles wrote:
| Even great artists do it. Some of the most famous movie posters
| by Drew Struzan are originally photographs:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/OldSchoolCool/comments/ejsb22/micha...
| taeric wrote:
| The article touches on this. I found the Norman Rockwell quote
| rather amusing.
| taeric wrote:
| Curious not to see the term rotoscoping mentioned. As a lot of
| what is shown in copying some pictures is effectively that, isn't
| it?
| egypturnash wrote:
| Rotoscoping is specifically tracing over a _sequence_ of images
| - usually video or film frames - to create a sequence of
| drawings that can be used in an animation workflow.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotoscoping
|
| Spaceballs' _State Of The Art_ and _9 Fingers_ are a couple of
| Amiga demoscene productions that relied on rotoscoping.
| taeric wrote:
| Right, I suppose you would call what Norman Rockwell was
| doing was tracing?
|
| I still see them as largely related? That not considered the
| case?
| egypturnash wrote:
| Artists and animators (like me!) make some fine
| distinctions between different ways of studying reality and
| transferring it onto the canvas.
|
| _Using a model_ is posing a live person and /or some
| objects and setting up lights and painting from that.
| Artists have done this for years. I've done this. Rockwell
| did this.
|
| _Using photo reference_ is taking photographs (yours or
| others ') and working from those. I've done this. Rockwell
| did this too!
|
| _Tracing_ is placing your reference image beneath or over
| your canvas, and tracing the contours you see in it.
| Tracing paper, chroma-key, projectors, camera lucidia,
| tracing the image onto acetate and taping that to your
| Amiga 's monitor to trace it again in DPaint, dropping ref
| into one layer in Photoshop and working over it in another
| one, these are all methods of tracing. I've done them all!
| Rockwell probably did this now and then, with the caveat
| that a pro's tracing is a very different beast from a
| beginner's - it's easy for a beginner to just trace the
| contours with no thought as to how they come together into
| a 3d shape, and get a drawing that feels dead and lifeless
| and subtly wrong. Saying someone's work looks like a
| tracing is kind of an insult.
|
| _Rotoscoping_ is explicitly a process of tracing
| /referencing a _sequence of images_ to produce a _sequence
| of images_ rather than a single image. It _is_ related! But
| this article is entirely discussing the way demoscene
| artists would reproduce a _static_ image, so roto does not
| apply here. Rockwell painted static images; he never did
| this.
|
| (It's certainly possible that Rockwell could have taken
| single frames of film and had them printed for reference,
| but that's still not roto. Roto's explicitly an _animation_
| process that results in _a series of drawings_ based on
| your film /video ref.)
| tomcam wrote:
| Well-balanced, well-written article. It linked to a site called
| demozoo that used Cloudflare bot detection to block me at least 6
| times from my home IP that CF had heretofore permitted, which is
| damn nice of them considering nothing nefarious ever originated
| from this address.
|
| So, no way to tell if the illustrations were illustrative.
| jrm4 wrote:
| This is a great examination, and I think reminds me of why I'm
| not so panicky about AI art -- there was pretty much the same
| kind of panic around the invention of photography.
|
| It will change, but craft and "look what I did" won't go away.
| deepsun wrote:
| "Good artists copy, great artists steal" (c) Picasso
| theAurenVale wrote:
| constraints are what make demo scene art so good imo. when you
| have 64k to work with every single pixel has to earn its place.
| compare that to AI image gen where you can produce alot of
| variations at zero cost and somehow everything ends up looking
| less intresting. theres something about working within tight
| limits that forces real creative decisions instead of just
| iterating until somthing looks ok
| dfxm12 wrote:
| I don't think anyone was selling demos commercially or trying to
| pass off the creative ideas as their own work. With this in mind,
| we should set aside ideas of plagiarism, copyright, etc. It was a
| showcase of technical prowess/creativity. People _knew_ what
| _Death Dealer_ looked like & if they saw it pop up in a demo,
| they wouldn't think the demogroup was passing it on as their
| original idea (I would assert this was a given). As such, it was
| meant to be a reference. People _thought_ they knew the
| limitation of their computer. They would play Lemmings, or
| whatever, and think that 's as good as the graphics on the Amiga
| can get. The point of the demo was to blow those conceptions
| away.
|
| The creative part in a demo wasn't the the art itself, the
| subject, the composition, etc., no, it was representing something
| thought impossible. Eventually, kinda like how photography
| changed painters' relationship with realistic representation,
| more powerful tech did the same with these types of demos, so the
| medium moved on.
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