

How to Build a Portrait with Dice (using Photoshop) - sgdesign
http://www.attackofdesign.com/how-to-build-a-portrait-with-dice-using-photoshop/

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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.)

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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.

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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?

~~~
Tloewald
Photoshop's scripting capabilities are pretty astonishing. I taught myself
over lunch the other day. You can script in JavaScript, AppleScript, or
VBScript and implement dialogs and UI panels.

It works exactly as you'd expect and scripts are quite lean (you don't need to
do a bunch of setup).

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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.

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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...

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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.

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

~~~
viraptor
If you reduce to 6 colours, then make a mosaic, you will get all different
shades of grade. Mosaic will take (simplifying) an average of colours one tile
covers.

~~~
bvdbijl
Yeah, you should swap those two steps

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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.

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

