It’s funny how ideas come and go. Most of my ideas are offsprings from earlier thoughts or works. That’s certainly the case with my Monotone Raster script, it stems back to the Tile Toy script via Fonticon.

Now, this script is probably my least useable one as the outcome wasn’t very nice or functional. So what does it do then?

Well, the idea was to make a script that would produce a raster image with only one tone. Aptly named Monotone Raster. Since a raster will create dots of varying sizes corresponding to the level of gray of the target image pixels. This is not very hard in Scriptographer. But what if I wanted to make a raster image with something other than a circle, or, a raster with multiple objects?

Well, that wasn’t that hard either so I took it a bit further. What if the objects looked different, but in reality they all had the same amount of black?

These objects seem to differ but they all represent 50% black so a rasterized picture would, at a distance, seem to be just a gray square but at closer range some details would appear and reveal a picture. This turned out to be wrong. Close up it didn’t make any sense at all, just a bunch of squares cluttered together.

However, I encountered alot of problems.

First off, with every object being quite alot bigger than a pixel the resulting raster image would become huge!

Secondly, every object contains many anchors so there would be millions of them making the file size very big.

Thirdly, getting Java to handle this many objects, one per pixel, without running out of memory is virtually impossible. One solution to this problem would be to reduce the target image resolution but that would also make it harder to discern any of the finer details, thus making the raster quite useless.

Although it didn’t turn out as I had planned I still think it is a novel idea that was definately worth exploring.