@PPD I think that's actually C64 charmode (no great difference, except that non-alphanumeric characters won't necessarily be ASCII characters, since they can be redefined).
@Dennis I haven't attempted to break down tile usage, but I feel that the primary 3 eyes could stand to be a lot more round and protuberant, even at the expense of other details, if possible -- they are one of the most emphasized parts in the design of Tachikoma, that give them most of their personality. If you look at some clips, you can see the way they roll their eyes (this is more literal 'eye rolling' than for people) adds a lot of expressiveness. It's kind of funny how well that club character works for the pupils, I would not have guessed that would work.
@PPDPersonally I agree that art is always a struggle, I was attempting to express that it seems much more so for larger pieces. One reason, I think, is something I've noticed recently -- If I don't place the object / canvas I'm observing directly in the centre of my FOV, my observations of it's proportions can get hilariously out of wack. I actively zoom out references for this reason. So the logical extrapolation is that a larger canvas (especially if it's a non-digital canvas) requires a lot more checking than a smaller one.
(roll on transhumanism -- larger eyes FTW
Hope you're pleased with the texturing in your latest post -- I think it's significantly improved over earlier posts, particularly in .. uh, fitting together into a thematic whole, I guess is what I mean. Very illustration-y.
@anyI did some 32x32 tag icons with DB32 palette
Intended to be used in conjunction with
TMSU and
lighthouse. It's fun typing in lighthouse to select tags and seeing my icons come up as I create them.
I made a reusable shell function out of the commandline I used to create the montage:
# accept a geometry (like 32x32+16+0, for a 32x32 area with a 16pix horizontal margin) and a list of png files
# compile all but the final argument into a montage, with the final argument being the output path.
named_tile_montage() {
GEOMETRY="$1"
FONTSIZE=6
BG=gray40
shift 1
# this is a hack that results in the final argument ending up in DEST.
# cf. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1853946/getting-the-last-argument-passed-to-a-shell-script
for DEST; do true; done
montage -geometry "$GEOMETRY" -pointsize "$FONTSIZE" -background "$BG" $(for V; do; if [ "$V" != "$DEST" ]; then; echo -label "${V%%.png}" "$V"; fi; done;) "$DEST"
}
Also updated my design kit
making tiny tiles is alarmingly addictive; up to 508 unique tiles now. 4x4 is an excellent choice for many sizes of repeating pattern -- see the stippling patterns, a slope of N generally takes N tiles before it meets up with itself -- less for higher N.