gloriouscow

Over a decade ago (sigh) I had managed to make a rig for Blender's old Freestyle renderer that generated pixel-art-ish icons like this:

Yes, this is a 3d model with no retrouching. It's not "pixel art" especially with all the antialiasing but it gives a very good impression of it at 100% scale (this is blown up 400%)

I really liked the results here - rendering a keyboard that has a lot of high frequency noise at this size without it turning into pure moire is pretty great.

MartyPC needs a decent setup/launcher interface, and my idea was to dust this off and render isometric views of the various systems MartyPC can emulate.

Unfortunately for the life of me, I cannot get anything like this effect anymore in a recent Blender version, and despite my best efforts I cannot hunt down the exact ancient version of Blender i used - all my attempts to load this project and render it again have all ended in sadness.

Anyone know of a good rig for doing this in Cycles?

#martypc #blender #blender3d

Feb 28 at 7:21pmWeb
Show threadSlic330Mar 1
@gloriouscow it’s actually really simple and you can disable anti-aliasing, which makes it completely indistinguishable from actual pixel art.
You can do a lot more to increase the effect (toom shaders etc.) but really all you have to do is change the render dimensions to be really small (e.g 32x32, 16x16, depending on how simple you want) and then scale it back up in compositing and disable anti-aliasing.
Show threadgloriouscowMar 1
@Slic330 Turning off antialiasing entirely makes it look like butt.
Show threaddmi 💽 Mar 1

@gloriouscow no clue about how to get this exactly in cycles, but now I need to pinpoint which version you used for this for my own purposes (this looks amazing, I need this for my own icons)

any idea about which year +- this comes from?

Show threadgloriouscowMar 1

@domi well, i got the big brain idea to just look at the blend file in a hex editor - it was saved with version 2.73. Off to the download archives....

the blend file is a total mess, i have no idea what is going on. i was making a bunch of different icons and it looks like instead of organizing them into groups or anything i was just setting the old stuff invisible. lol.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jzFaof_Q1i4vQMDWUEh6Oh1mh2rmokS1/view?usp=drive_link

net_icons_12.zip

Google Docs
Show threaddmi 💽 Mar 1

@gloriouscow gonna check this out once I get back home, I think I have blender of similar vintage on my dual p1 machine :3

lmk if you manage to get good results again!

Show threadgloriouscowMar 1

@domi

this is another example of what it was doing - trying to pixel-art tiny isometric arrows would drive any person insane so this was a godsend