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[BlackFlyme]

I've been following a day/night cycle tutorial for unreal engine.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Cathar]

Last artfight pictures of the year :')


Edit : goobles


Edit 2 : Some pages for a dumb fancomic I do to train up

[wierd]

I have been working on resurrecting an old pen plotter. (HP 7440A / HP ColorPro)

It holds 8 little stubby pens.  I have modified/cut the chasis so that long pens can be loaded, and bought some little aluminum pen holders to hold inexpensive ballpoint pen ink tubes/tips.

This is an (incomplete, Plotter's X axis linear rail was apparently dry, and too stiff, causing the printer to abort about 75% through. That's ok, manual inspection of the plot file shows it was never going to actually change pens like it was supposed to anyway) AI generated image produced from Imagine.AI (Very good quality generator, actually!), that I ran through it and DrawingBotsv3-Premium

The pen is a very crappy "It actually came from the front desk at a casino!" ballpoint pen, calibrated to "just barely touch the paper".  It draws like an inexpensive BiC pen, which is why I stole it from work. (It was already stolen once, being a promotional pen from a casino...)



This plotter only accepts letter sized paper, and has a max plottable area of 8x10 inside the 8.5x11 paper. (needs .25" margins on all sides)


I am considering using this machine and software toolchain to make pen-drawn portraiture of my residents for their families. (with permission, of course.)

[King Zultan]

That's pretty cool looking, so is a pen plotter is a computer controlled thing that draws what you tell it to?

[wierd]

Yes.

Mine is an HP 7440A (ColorPro)

It speaks a limited subset of the HP Graphics Language (HPGL), which is human-readable, and talks on a serial port.

In theory, you can control it directly from any oldschool BASIC interface that supports a serial port, since it uses human-readable plain-text command codes. The bread and butter commands with this plotter are:

IN;  (Initialize printer)
DF; (Load printer defaults)
PS(n); Set pen pressure
SP(n); Select Pen
PU(X,Y); (Pen Up, move to location in .01mm increments)
PD(X.Y); (Same as above, but with Pen Down)

Basically, a computer controlled etch-a-sketch


DrawingBotsV3 (Premium!!) has a subprogram to communicate with these old plotters, and is able to produce the volumetric shading needed to use a pen to render a modern pixel-based image into pen strokes. (using a variety of methods)

Free software, like InkScape also can speak HPGL over a serial port, to send paths to such a device, but my plotter does not support the FILL operation, or programmed polygons. (It WOULD with the 'graphics enhancement', but I have been unable to locate one!)

[Cathar]

Commission I did this week

[Strif3]

Blender is my favourite vector art program.

[wierd]

More AI art out of the plotter.

3 pens, 2 manually diluted ink.
(Pentel RSVP, Stock, 50% dilution, 75% dilution; Cut with glycerin)





I am experimenting on getting a quality set of pens (on the cheap) to get good shading / color fidelity out of this thing, then I will start doing vector art with it.

[Rockeater]

Spoiler: First attempt to work with clay (click to show/hide)

Was supposed to be ghostly but when I tried to mix the light blue with white it was still too blue, so it's more watery then the original plan

[wierd]

For 'ghostly', you want a single 'speck' (like, black pepper speck size) of pthalo blue with a good sized dollop of titanium white, in my experience.

[Cathar]

8 pager done. Was fun to make

Online on reddit
Download on dA

[brewer bob]

Haven't been trying pixel pushing in ages, but managed to do a EGA Lucasarts Loom/Monkey Island inspired banner for an upcoming DF community fort:



Original dimensions 480x207, used classic EGA 16 color palette.

The dithering and color usage is basically a rip-off from Loom, though I did place the pixels myself. (I really suck with colors, so was easier just looking what others did. Plus I haven't really used dithering that much, so a reference was nice.)

[wierd]

Unlike CGA which has only like, 4 programmable palettes of really shit colors-- EGA has a fully programmable register of 16 colors out of a nice spread of 64 colors that can be used.

The full EGA 64 color palette is available in a few modes even, but they are not officially supported by IBM. (their hardware will just do it if you throw the right registers at it.)
The color choices used by, EG, LOOM (vs Monkey Island), are taken to select for mood(tm), so if you were looking for an austere or somber theme, why not just steal the color selection?

Just pointing out that the full EGA palette is well known, and documented.

https://moddingwiki.shikadi.net/wiki/File:EGA_Table_Hex.svg

[brewer bob]

CGA, EGA... *technical details beyond my puny brain*

We just used to call this certain 16 color palette EGA as kids back in the day, so it's stuck since then. Probably going to keep using it even if it's not technically correct. 

...And yeah, I didn't use all the 16 colors, but took a "mood" selection from them. I'm just limiting my choices to these colors:

[wierd]

I think I will push your pixel art through my plotter software with some 'extended gamut* '(ahem) marker pens, and see what comes out.

I just recently made some ghetto pen holders for some LaPen brand .3mm ceramic tip markers (in pastel hues) and want to try them out.

* (a total of 8 markers can live in the carousel, for 50% grey, cyan, magenta, yellow, teal, peach, lavender, and blue.)


---

For reference, CGA can only use 4 colors at a time, out of 16 possible, selected from 4 pre-defined palettes.

IT'S BUTT UGLY.


and is why Monkey Island looks like..... THIS..... in CGA mode.


And looks like **THIS** in EGA mode.