Now, when I had an image to work with I quickly wrote a function that divide the image into a number of rectangles that then takes on the average color of its underlying area – I’ll be refering to this rectangle as the color sampling area. This function then calls other small functions that applies all the different rasters I could think of. Here is a run-down of the effects.

STANDARD MOSAIC RASTER
This is a pretty straight forward mosaic raster effect but I managed to optimize the process as it’s usually made by drawing a bunch of rectangles that acts like a pixel. This will put considerable strain to Illustrator because, as we all know, a rectangle has four corners that it has to keep track of. Therefore the amount of anchor points will be four times that of the number of objects.

The image above contains 16,384 rectangle objects which would, under normal circumstances, equal to 65,536 anchor points. But, instead of making rectangles I’m drawing the objects as vertical lines with strokes applied to the lines the size of the sample area. This way I get by with only half of the anchor points; 32,768. The two images below show the difference.

351 rectangles = 1,404 anchor points

351 paths = 702 anchor points

Another advantage, I think, is that I can choose to modify the width of the strokes. Below is an image that has the exact same properties as the previous only the stroke width is half of the color sampled area. This results in a kind of white, vertical interference pattern.

RGB PIXEL RASTER
This is supposed to imitate the pixels of old cathode ray TVs. Nothing fancy but just something that I had to try out.

It made for a somewhat nice effect but not very special. Not until I started to play around and rotating each pixel by 90 degrees increments yielding a very prominent pattern. While I was kinda surprised at the outcome it seems it’s too limited to be of any use.

In an effort to reduce the patterning a bit I let the “rgb-pixels” rotate randomly, again in 90 degrees increments.

This could have been it had I not kept on manipulating the outcome. I isolated the different color channels in Photoshop but neither the red nor the blue channel where very interesting. The green one, though, was way cooler.

Clearly this cross-hatch pattern has a lot more to offer than the previous two. So much so, in fact, that I imported the result to Photoshop where I ramped up the contrast and had the green color desaturated.

I feel the end-result is interesting enough to warrant its own script. Got to get to it.

DASHED RGB PIXEL RASTER
When thinking of CRT pixels I came up with yet another way. What if the red, green and blue intensity of each pixel was always at its maximum value and instead just activate parts of it. I don’t really know how to explain it, but I’ll give it a try. Below, anyway, is the final outcome and at first, it didn’t come out quite as I expected. It looks kinda inverted, but…

…the colors are still preserved and when adding a black background it turns the image into this.

Each of the sampled areas are divided into 3 x 8 “cells”. The higher value of each color channel the more of the “cells” are going to be filled in.

For instance, above is the average color of the complete Lenna image. The color components are, [177, 99, 106], so dividing by 32 and rounding to its nearest integer on each channel, gives [6, 3, 3]. So, for the red channel, 6 out of 8 “cells” are filled. Green channel, 3 out of 8 are filled and for the blue – yep you guessed it – 3 out of 8. These numbers are then randomly distributed which means that two colors with exactly the same channel values might not be diplayed in the same way.
Unfortunately, Illustrator can only make dashed strokes with a maximum of three dashes and three gaps. Therefore, a line in the form of;

dashArray = [dash, gap, dash, gap, dash, gap, dash]

will not display correctly as Illustrator simply ignores the input from the last dash and onwards. Instead – as a workaround – the last dash will have to be added to the first. So, let’s say a color channel array looks like this;

dashArray = [1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 2]

In order to be a valid dash array it would have to be re-arranged like this;

dashArray = [3, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0]

I don’t know if I’m making any sense trying to explain how it works but the end-result is quite nice, I think.

RGB + CMYK PIXEL RASTER
Now this is starting to get a little too far fetched. I split each sample area into an 8 “cell” pixel, converted all color channels into binary and performed almost like a bitwise OR operation.

The same average image color as before. The color channels – in binary – reads like:

red   = 10110100
green = 01100011
blue  = 01101001

Then, taking one number from each channel in sequential order yields RGB values as such:

Red   = rgb(1, 0, 0)
Cyan  = rgb(0, 1, 1)
White = rgb(1, 1, 1)
Red   = rgb(1, 0, 0)
Blue  = rgb(0, 0, 1)
Red   = rgb(1, 0, 0)
Green = rgb(0, 1, 0)

and finally

Cyan  = rgb(0, 1, 1)

I know, I’m not making any sense here and I think the outcome is not very comprehensive either, or nice for that matter. Maybe it could used for glitch art or something. Anyway, one can BARELY work out some details in the image so I guess this one is the least useful of the bunch.

Please, Tom, release this for OSX and/or iOS!!!

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.

There I’m sitting, at work, the time is 03:22am and for some reason I’m googling pictures of the old boardgame HeroQuest when one image catches my eye. It’s by this guy; Mattias Gustavsson, posted over at RetroGameDev, who has made a pixel shader for a project he’s working on. The shader makes your images look like tmhey are viewed on an old worn-out TV. As it happens, Mattias made an executable of his filter, but unfortunately, it’s for Windows only…

As I’m in love with (or, at least, very fond of) all things retro, this was right up my alley. Clearly, nostalgia is the proof of that you’re getting older.

The picture above is from the Amiga version of HeroQuest, borrowed – without permission – from Kim Lemon’s wonderful site LemonAmiga (also check out his Lemon64 site, if your old enough to remember that one). I ran this image through Mattias’ filter and merged the result with the original as a comparison. I find the latter, with its smoother appearance, much more pleasing to the eye. It’s also more how I remember it looked back in the day when I used to play this game on a crappy old 15″ TV. Not at all those crisp, but dead, pixels you get on a new LCD display.

I would love to have his pixel shader as a Photoshop Action so I could combine it with Philip “Pepto” Timmermann‘s C64 Palette for that full-on, ultra-high, retro feel of 8-bit games.

Above; first one is a guesstimated C64 palette, the second is rendered with the “real” C64 palette (mentioned above), the third one is the same as the second but have had Mattias Gustavsson’s filter applied to it. Now, if that doesn’t take you back, I don’t know what does!

I don’t know how he made it, but if I was to venture a guess, I would say that he first applied a layer of interlaced scanlines on both axis as the picture is twice the size afterwards. Then it seems that the picture is somewhat blured to imitate the not-so-sharp image of a CRT television as well as some color correction and/or color cast. Finally, there is a fair amount of RGB shifting by offsetting the three color channels in different directions. Then again, he could be doing something else entirely. It is, however, one of the more authentic looking effects I’ve seen in a while.

And, while we’re at the topic of old displays, check out Secret Geometry‘s beautiful terminal emulator made as a monochrome monitor. Very Pipboy-ish…

Apparently, ALL the Commodore 64 emulators out there are mapping the colors somewhat wrong. Philip ‘Pepto’ Timmermann, on the other hand, has made an incredible job to get the colors right. He has a very comprehensive page explaining his method of getting the ‘true colors’ of the c64 here.

A comparison between the emulated colors and the ‘true colors’, as seen below, shows that the latter is much more muted and dull but in fact closer to how the colors were actually processed.

Well, enough of the ol’ c64. There are a lot more swatches but they are much more straight forward so I won’t be going through them all. Here’s just a few.

Amstrad CPC system:

Apple II:

Nintendo 8-bit:

The idea is to limit one selfs creative process by using only the colors provided by each system.

Listed below are all these different systems that are included in my Retro Color Swatch Pack.

• Amstrad CPC
• Apple II
• Atari 2600 NTSC
• Atari 2600 PAL
• CGA
• Commodore 64
• Commodore Plus/4
• Commodore VIC-20
• EGA
• Gameboy
• Mattel Aquarius
• MSX
• Nintendo 8-bit
• Sega Master System
• Teletext
• Thomson MO5
• ZX Spectrum