8-BIT REBORN
The other day, when, due some reason, I had to excavate some very old archives, I’ve found some pictures that I drew 20-odd years ago in the unforgettable editor Art Studio on my speccy.
Armed with a strange set of utilities I dug some .bmps (from .scl (from .trd)), and it turned out that the images with a stretch of the imagination can be attributed to the pixel-art and can be useful, as I have my hands itched to play with the de-pixelation algorithms for a long time.
The most interesting article I found in this area was the relatively recent article “Depixelizing Pixel Art” by two guys from, afaik, Microsoft. However, they didn’t provide any ready-to-use code, so I had to look into several related projects. From what I’ve tried, more or less meaningful results came from potrace and vectormagic:
Some comments:
- first row — the original drawings (zoomed x2 without any smoothing)
- middle — the results from vectormagic (with very easy tuning of the settings)
- bottom row — the results from potrace (with default settings).
It is visible, that vectormagic has a soft spot for triangles and circles in moments of doubt, and both the algorithms are not very friendly with the concept of dithering.
But one way or another, the results were much better than I expected.
Here are some more pictures:
