Non-Square Pixelart

Because regular pixelart is apparently not hard enough.

As part of a project with Cheezopath and Tibi, I’ve looked into how to make pixelart with non-square pixels, like those used for Capcom’s CPS2 arcade games.

We’ve found a few ways of doing it, including…

Edit Through A Stretched Live Video Feed

Someone’s being tricked here

Very doable with OBS, and even VLC. But the large size and framerate, that the video needs to be usable, lagged on my PC setup.

Opentoonz With Stretched Camera Preview

Wait, it can do that? I was just messing around on a whim.

Pretty good results, but mostly for character art. Also limits you to using just Opentoonz.

Make sure that you always know, when you are viewing the stretched or unstretched Opentoonz canvas, if you use this method.

GIMP, The

I’m too busy to look at better ways right now, but not too busy to wrestle with a bad workflow.

Disable Dot for Dot, then set up an uneven Print Size height and width. Save as XCF to keep the print size property. Limits you to GIMP’s unintuitive drawing workflows and keyboard shortcuts.

Stretch an Entire Desktop Screen

Nothing can satisfy my needs, except the power to directly bend spacetime itself.

This is the option I am currently using.

I use two screens. One is my main monitor, the other is the drawing tablet’s screen, which is a very no-nonsense 1920 × 1080 pixels. I think some might even consider that old-fashioned these days?

Anyway, if I want to warp my tablet’s screen so that pixels get stretched to a 7:9 ratio, I have to go into my NVidia X Server Settings… and do a bit of basic math along the way.

To get my tablet to 7:9 pixel-aspect-ratio, it wouldn’t do me any good to stretch its virtual screen vertically, as that would just go off-screen. So I’m going to squash it horizontally with this formula.

Starting with Tablet Width × (Width Ratio ÷ Height Ratio)…
Which becomes 1920 × ( 7 ÷ 9)…
Which finally gives me 1493.33333….

We’re I’m going, I don’t need decimals to see, so I’ll just take the 1493, and plop it into the NVidia X Server Settings. Specifically:

Using NVidia driver settings on Linux, I change the output width of the screen that i draw on. I then change the coordinates of my pen for my drawing tablet, to limit it to the new slimmer screen output.

Since I’m emulating a 7:9 pixel aspect ratio, the stretched text on UI’s isn’t too hard to read for me, but your mileage may vary. However, I have to set and unset NVidia and the tablet manually each time. Maybe one day I’ll write a script that does this for me, if I’m feeling brave, foolish or bored.

Carré