Beyond Authentic Pixel Art in Unreal Engine
summary
Cardboard Sword adapts pixel art to Unreal Engine by keeping strict rules—orthographic camera, tilemap grid of 32×32 tiles, and a restrained palette of about 80–90 colors—then selectively bending them: grayscale lookup tables for visibility states, localized pixel distortion for flicker, and hand-painted normal maps to sculpt broad shapes. Development moves from Gamemaker to UE4/Paper2D, limits lights to roughly 5–10 lights per scene, and accepts extra artist labor rather than automatic shortcuts.
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chapters (35)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:21My Background
- 1:42Stealth
- 1:54Exploration
- 2:15Pixel Art
- 2:35Artist Background
- 3:16Batman
- 4:00Zelda
- 4:21Metal Slug
- 4:42Common Themes
- 5:16Photoshop Mockup
- 5:44Animations
- 7:00Dev Grant Pitch
- 7:26Material & Lighting
- 8:42Authenticity
- 9:49Pixel Limitations
- 10:52Limited Colour Palettes
- 13:07The Rules - Summary
- 14:19Distortion
- 15:45Tilemap Specs
- 15:55Half tile placement
- 16:25Tilemap Layers
- 17:05Final pass
- 17:18Siege 2017
- 18:06Normal Maps
- 20:37Particles
- 21:59Colour Shift-Converting Characters
- 23:27Moving to the Perspective Camera
- 25:06Performance
- 25:39World Size
- 26:13Getting started with Paper 2D
- 27:17Orthographic Camera
- 28:13Make Something Authentic
- 29:03Make It With UE4
- 29:54Dev Live Streams
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