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Pixel art scaling issues

First off, amazing tool Chris, and I am amazed how on the board you are with the questions. 

At the moment I am making an adventure with pixel art and I am trying to figure out what is the most efficient way to do it which is still aesthetically pleasing. 

So far I have tried
  1. upscaling the pixel art myself via photoshop x300 percent 
  2. Upscaling all the art within the editor x3
  3. Downscaling the camera 
The pixel art is painted at a 640x360 resolution 

Downscaling the camera is the most practical of the 3 since I don't need to touch the assets, but it causes an issue with character placement and the icons are annoyingly large. What I mean by issue with character placement, the character will not move on top of the area you clicked, as if there is some invisible area blocking it.
That may sound vague so I made a gif 

https://gfycat.com/YawningDopeyAlligatorsnappingturtle

I made the character quite small here to exaggerate the effect to make it more clear. 

Upscaling the art in the editor seems second most practical and seems to fix the above problem, however I am not sure if this is the best way to do it in the long run (I don't want to pump out all the assets only to find this is actually a terrible way to do things. )

With the above context, the real question is: What is the best way to use adventure creator with low res pixel art. 


Thank you so much for your time. 

Comments

  • edited June 2018
    The gif doesn't show how large the graphics are in Unity units, but you should generally try to stick to 1 unit = 1 metre, as pathfinding is designed to be used at around this scale.

    The "Unity best practice" way to achieve this is to adjust the Pixels Per Unit field in the asset's Inspector, rather than adjusting it in Photoshop or its scale in your scene.

    For more, see the first "Note" box in the Manual's "Preparing a 2D scene" chapter.  You can also compare your graphics with the included 2D Demo (for exampe, dropping in the 2D Demo's Player to test your scene with).

    Be mindful that the Inspector's Filter Mode field also affects a sprite's "crispness", and setting it to Point (no filter) will remove any kind of automatic smoothing, but this is more Unity-related than AC.

    When it comes to AC, it is recommended that pixel art games make use of Retro-style movement? in your Player's Inspector - for more on that, see the Manual's "Retro movement" chapter.
  • Awesome thanks man. I actually spent this morning combing through the forums for similar answers (Sorry I should of done that earlier, I only initially used google haha) 

    So now I've set it up with Pixels Per Unit. Things seem to be working as they should and characters aren't distorting too badly, about the same when I manually expanded to 1080. 

    Currently my scale is slightly larger than the 2D demos, will this be a problem?

    Thanks for your help!
  • Larger by how much?  It doesn't need to be exact, and there are sliders to help you tweak things like accuracy etc, so if it's not by a lot you should be fine.
  • Not too much, I've adjusted the ppu as if it is 1080p artwork, everything seems to be working nicely. 

    Thanks!
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