Official Off-Topic Thread 2016

[surt]

They also developed but never released a graphics tablet for the Master System. Take that Mario Paint!

[Ai]

Canvassing some auto-AA options:


All options introduce a slight degree of offsetting of the original shapes. Also, all options tend to fail at rendering 1px-thick lines.

Personally, the AnisoSmooth and DCCI2x+AnisoSmooth options look generally most promising; with vectorization tending to simplify too much (but handling right angles and preservation of line weight better)

EDIT: Any of these options probably should also be 'finished' by applying some strength of 'bilateral smooth' (which, contrary to its name, tends to result in an image that looks simpler and crisper).

[RAV]

Amusing in how it explains and experiments with pixel tech of the past.

[RAV]

What fascinates me about those days is, that the creativity of the art was in conserving both, colours and patterns, yet constructing a visual that would try to look rich, organic and alive non the less. At some point though, people kept emphasizing colours for the genre definition, but almost lost count entirely on patterns. My personal opinion on the matter is, if anything, that pattern conservation is at least as important to the genre as colour conservation. Yet today we only complain about a wastefulness in colours. Pixel art introduced into the art world new concepts of significance, such as the unprecedented ease of reusability, with the reduction of the world to its barest quintessential. It may be its most defining strength and trademark. A lot of it got lost when digital arts more and more tried to mimic traditional arts. In that sense I must admit, I almost miss a pattern count analysis and critique in a supposedly strict place like PJ, as much as it would advice the art on colours.

[RAV]

Robotics / Animatronics:

[RAV]

Sales Chart for Shovel knight:

Shovel Knight has sold 1.2 million units total! 200,000 of those units are physical retail sales. We’re still in a bit of shock here! Previously, a successful game in our portfolio would barely break 50k copies sold. Want to know the platform breakdown? Here’s a graph!

[surt]

Anybody know of good creative tools for the HTC Vive (excluding Tilt Brush of course)?

[Mathias]

. . .
some of you might enjoy https://www.reddit.com/r/glitch_art/ , occasionally they find neat stuff.
. . .

Prep' for glory - http://pislices.ca/

[Ai]

Anyone got some tips for scanning especially large media in a standard A4 scanner? Not necessarily that hi-quality (IMO, highly finished stuff should always be done digitally), but I want to get decently accurate scans with a minimum of crazy contortions, for my digital archive.

Up to a certain size, you can simply scan one end and then the other, using the overlapping scan area to compensate for the area that is distorted as it trails out of the scanner. Digitally stitching the scans is fairly simple in this (1d series) case.

But for -really- huge media -- 55x40cm or thereabouts -- this gets pretty hairy, and I only have a solid solution if there's a convenient band of empty space I can cut through to break it into smaller pieces.

(when I ask Google, it wants to sell me expensive wide-format scanners. Which is understandable but totally excessive)

I feel like I should be able to use a panorama stitcher like HugIn to auto-stitch scans -- there's even a tutorial for that. But in practice all it does is crash.

EDIT: Solved? The run_scan-pto_var.sh provided in the tutorial was a bit off, but with some edits:

Code: [Select]

#! /bin/sh
# hugin command tools script to stitch scanned images, fov unknown
# use of fov >= 10 should be OK, could simply set FOV=10
# Terry Duell 2013, 2014
#
# Taking filenames of scans from cmdline args added by David Gowers
# prefix option removed since it's only used by pto2mk, which doesn't exist any more.


# usage:
#  stitchscans.sh fov filenames-of-scans
#
# eg:
#  stitchscans.sh 10 scan-1.jpg scan-2.jpg
#
# As the final step, hugin is invoked. You need to then go to the 'stitcher' tab in hugin and click 'Stitch' to finish the process.
# It will produce a TIFF, with a default filename constructed by concatenating your input filenames -- eg. "scan-1.jpg" "scan-2.jpg" produces "scan-1 scan-2.tiff"

FOV=$1
shift 1

pto_gen --projection=0 --fov=$FOV -o project.pto "$@"
# scan-1.jpg scan-2.jpg
pto_lensstack -o project1.pto --new-lens i1 project.pto
cpfind -o project1.pto --multirow project1.pto
cpclean -o project2.pto project1.pto
linefind -o project3.pto project2.pto
pto_var -o setoptim.pto --opt r,d,e,!r0,!d0,!e0 project3.pto
autooptimiser -n -o autoptim.pto setoptim.pto
pano_modify  --projection=0 --fov=AUTO --center --canvas=AUTO --crop=AUTO -o loadme.pto autoptim.pto
hugin loadme.pto

You will need 'hugin' and 'perl-panotools-script' packages installed on a Linuxish system. This definitely works for 1d layouts (a line of overlapping scans), should also work for 2d layouts (a grid of overlapping scans) but haven't finished testing yet, so don't know for sure.

EDIT2: seems a bit unreliable. I've tried feeding in a lot of scans, few scans, 1d layouts, 2d layouts.. whether I get a sensible result seems hard to predict.

EDIT3: After more extensive testing, this is my verdict: When it is good, it is very very good. When it is bad, it is terrible.
It's typically good when the number of input images is low (2-3); it will align images correctly and pick a cropping rectangle that is ALMOST right (usually needs a little expansion -- look in the 'stitcher' tab).
When the number of input images is high(>=4), it tends to erroneously detect horizons and this results in a crazy stitching that's altogether useless. (more detailed sketches might contain more features to align and thus suffer less from this problem)
So.. it's a good time saver for those smaller stitchings. Larger ones still seem to need manual stitching.

[surt]

New Pro Motion release has features I conned Jan into adding to make it easier to do parallax work and save out GIFs of it.
http://www.cosmigo.com/promotion/index.php?Downloads:Changes_History