UPDATE (Feb 27 – 23:28)
Seems they have corrected their little mishap and added the credits at the bottom.

UPDATE (Feb 28 – 12:08)
More corrections! Apparently Visuelle.co.uk had nothing to do with the whole ordeal as he was just posting stuff that he found interesting. Being a nice guy, he contacted Everyday Workshops and informed them about the mistake. So sorry David!

Lighting
Maybe the biggest addition to the script are the three sliders (one for each side of the blocks; top, left & right) to adjust the amount of light falling on each side. This can be used both as a way to increase the contrast – like in the image below – as well as change the entire lighting direction.

Elevate
This function was actually included in the previous version but I’ll consider it new anyway. What this list does is to simply tell the script that either ‘Light’ or ‘Dark’ colors should be elevated. The script checks the brightness level of the sampled area and uses that value as a multiplier with the Max Height value. Therefore, as the ‘Light’ value is default, lighter blocks are rendered higher, of course the same happens with dark blocks if Elevate is set to ‘Dark’.

Draw Non-Elevated & Threshold
Having this option turned OFF when running the script with images with an overall uniform background can be useful to not draw blocks of limited height that would otherwise be drawn as a thin flat object. The accompanying Threshold value – enabled ONLY if Draw Non-Elevated is turned OFF – is the amount by how high a block needs to be in order to be drawn by the script. Note that the threshold is limited to values between zero and the Max Height value, the maximum threshold value will vary accordingly.

Outlines
I’ve also added an option to turn the outlines ON and OFF. Not very big enhancment as it is very easy to just turn of the stroke of all selected objects directly inside Illustrator but I thought this way was more convenient.

I just noticed that googling images with ‘Scriptographer’ as search word, the preview picture of my aMaze script is the first hit! How could that be, how’d it get there? There ought to be several other images ahead of that particular one, but sure enough, there it is, at the top. The explanation is that it was featured in a post on GoMediaZine about Scriptographer along with some other scripts. No wonder it got such a high rank. There was also this nice quote, saying:

“Some fancy, some functional, regardless I think you’d agree these would be an excellent addition to your design arsenal.”

I’d say, if anywhere, my script would fall under the functional category…

Another nice thing that caught my eye was that this post on Buckeye Interactive‘s blog used my isometric block script to promote the plugin.

And while we’re on that topic, Faycal posted this self-initiated take on Manhattan on his portfolio/blog MyCommunityCreative.

Far from being as violent as the Judge Dredd story; Block Mania (although I’d squeeze in a reference to Old Stoney Face any chance I get), I’ve spent a few evenings drawing a bunch (and more to come) of isometric blocks. Isometric tile editors are usually associated with pixelart, not vectors, so my original intent was to script a tool in which I could sculpt with these blocks. I discarded that idea after realizing it would be a massive undertaking and not a very stable solution. Not really knowing what I would do with them, I continued drawing anyway, as I’m just so fond of isometric projection, as evident in one of my earlier posts.

This fascination stems back to the days or yore when I was playing games on my Amiga 500 (those where the days!) such as Marble Madness, Populous and D/Generation to name a few. Well, not to mention cyberpunk-awesomeness Syndicate, of which there are rumors that swedish Starbreeze Studios will “reinvent”.

Anyway, I ended up with all these building blocks, wanting to create miniature worlds (there it is again, my megalomaniacal behavior), but not wanting to manually drag them into place and having to adjust the layer order all the time.

The solution – which might not be the best in terms of time efficiency – was to script a little tool that could parse a text file into a nested array representing the X, Y and Z-axis. Instead of handling mouse events and coming up with a smart solution as to how I was going to manage selection of blocks (which most likely would have to involve some inconvenient keyboard input), I just lay my “world” out on graph-paper, an excel document or such; one sheet per level, like this.

Perhaps time consuming, but I think it could work to my advantage, having to carefully plan ahead instead of throwing myself Head Over Heels (isometric pun intended).

And to top it off, here’s some isometric galore to – literally – fill your screen with!

Left to right: Syndicate, Populous, Cadaver, Darkmere, Uropa², Marble Madness, D/Generation, Head Over Heels and Escape From The Planet Of Robot Monsters.

This worked just fine. However the math to build the isometric blocks turned out to be somewhat tricky for someone like me who had virtualy no experience in programming.

It creates a kind of retro game feeling, almost like that old Marble Madness game I played in my early teens.

Unfortunately, there are some memory constrains and speed issues when working with javascript in Illustrator so if I wanted to produce this effect for every pixel in a picture it would have to be a small bitmap in order to avoid a memory overflow error. But as an abstract blocky isometric picture generator it works just fine!