How to Build a Portrait with Dice (using Photoshop)

[nezumi]

It's great to see examples where code can be side-stepped in favour of a quick-n-dirty, 'designer'-type solution - different ways of thinking about the problem.

I have fond memories of my first years in the VFX industry being made a fool of by non-programmer effects artists who, by hooking together a few nodes in the industry-standard package Houdini, could in minutes recreate algorithms that took weeks for me to code the 'right' way, and in a couple more minutes interactively tweak the constants to get results which I would have taken even more weeks to derive 'scientifically'. It was a crash-course in the value of rapid-prototyping, but also in that particular case introduced me to new ways of thinking: Houdini presents a completely different view of geometry and image processing, which is thoroughly non-intuitive to the typical comp-sci graduate. Houdini taught me an (almost literally) orthogonal way of thinking about computer graphics problems.

The lessons are more general: - rapid prototyping is not necessarily coding - sometimes the non-technical, 'designer' approach is the more efficient one (not necessarily in this case - there is plenty of merit in both approaches) - the more tools you learn, the more leverage you have - why not learn some of those design tools and learn a different way of thinking about things.

(This comment is inspired-by, not directed-at, the two dice portrait posts.)

[sgdesign]

I thought it was interesting to see a different solution to the same problem (see: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3254392 ). The developer thinks "let's write some code!", but the designer thinks "let's use Photoshop!"…

[veyron]

The designer thinks to use the tools he or she is most familiar with, just like the developer.

[sgdesign]

Turns out Photoshop is even more powerful than what you'd think: I created an action to automate the whole process with any photo. You can download it here:

http://cl.ly/BwdO

(By the way, little known fact: you can actually script Photoshop using Javascript. I once used this to automatically generate all letter tiles as separate images for a touchscreen keyboard based on a template)

[pavel_lishin]

> you can actually script Photoshop using Javascript.

Could you write up a tutorial post?

[thesnark]

I am the guy who wrote the original post, I think this is great work, I wish I could use photoshop as proficiently!

I should say that for my part, I drew inspiration from flight404: http://www.flight404.com/blog/?p=131

and a paper I read where someone wrote an algorithm to do this with dominos.

[e28eta]

I'd be intrigued if something could be done with the orientation of the 2, 3, and 6 faces to improve image quality.

I'm coming up mostly blank, but they probably create textures when the same number is in a large contiguous block and the orientations are the same.

Also, I'm wondering if anything can be done with 2&3 specifically because they have bright corners and dark corners.

I'm guessing the effects are fairly subtle and can't really be used to good effect, but...

[viraptor]

I wonder why did they reduce the number of colours twice? Using the mosaic filter pretty much canceled the effect of the first "posterize" run.

[sgdesign]

That was a mistake on my part. I didn't realize that "mosaic" would introduce unnecessary shades of grey in the mix.

This comment explains the problem:

http://www.attackofdesign.com/how-to-build-a-portrait-with-d...

And you can also check out Marc Edwards' take on this:

http://dribbble.com/shots/324185-Dice-Portrait-Tutorial#comm...

[bvdbijl]

I believe this is because you would be getting a mosaic with all the different shades of gray instead of only 6

[DougBTX]

Just an oversight. He says at the end of step three that "we have our image divided into 16px tiles colored with 6 shades of grey", but as you point out, if you count the number of shades in the image above, there are more than six.

[gutini]

I used a similar visual concept to produce the following: http://www.behance.net/gallery/Impossible-Triangle/1968627

However, I chose to manually use random numbers so it wasn't exactly quick. I wonder if there's a way I could have hooked Photoshop up to do that.

[Tloewald]

It would look better if the image were dithered into the target palette.