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

@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?

@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

@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!

@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