Unordered dithering gives better form shading as there is no structure overlaying the shape,I would love to see "Recursive Wang Tiles for Real-Time Blue Noise
ps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykACzjtR6rc" combined with that technique
Link to part of video that shows it in action:<p><a href="https://youtu.be/HPqGaIMVuLs?si=P11cFnSLcv57Wj3K&t=1236" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/HPqGaIMVuLs?si=P11cFnSLcv57Wj3K&t=1236</a>
Technically, this is very cool. Aesthetically, though, the end result doesn't look very good, at least in my opinion. The Obra Dinn visual style is attempting to find a compromise between having the game look like its visuals are prerendered 3D scenes, dithered for an old 1-bit display. As the video explains, a lot of work had to go into striking a balance between the intended aesthetic, and playability, because it turns out that the dithered aesthetic is difficult to work with. This, though, just kind of ends up looking like a pseudo-halftone style applied to high-res polygonal models. Maybe it would look better at 320x240 or something?
Related discussion a couple of months ago <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42084080">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42084080</a><p>Lots of related links including one to a tweetier version of this work.
I got the itch to try and create an Atkinson dithering paint program.<p>What do I mean by that? Imagine a grayscale paint program (like, say, Procreate, just all grays) but all the pixels go through an Atkinson dither before hitting the screen.<p>To the artist you're kind of darkening or lightening the dither, so to speak, in areas of the canvas with your brush/eraser. (Kind of crowding or thinning the resulting B&W pixels).<p>An hour spent with Claude to make this happen in HTML5 caused me to set the experiment aside. It was okay, but only did the dither after the mouse was released. I wasn't driven enough to try to get it to dither in real-time (as the brush is being stroked).<p>The mouse is a terrible painting tool too — with a touch interface on an iPad (again, like Procreate) it might be worth pursuing further. It would need to be very performant as I say — so that you could see the dither as the brush is moving. (This might require a special bitmap and code where you store away the diffusion error so that you can update only a portion of the screen — where the brush has move - rather than having to re-dither the entire document 60 fps.)
I am pondering a different approach:<p>* Use error diffusion dithering in screen space<p>* Generate motion vectors for every pixel from the previous frame<p>Now, to make the next frame:<p>* Take the previously displayed (dithered) image and apply the motion vectors.<p>* Now use that as the threshold map to do error diffusion dithering on the next frame.<p>The threshold doesn't really matter for error diffusion dithering - since any error will be propagated to the next pixel. However, if you use a previous frame as a threshold map, it will encourage pixels not to 'flicker' every frame.
As I watched the video I got an idea.<p>Could this somehow be repurposed such that the points would be "check points" for a generative texture algorithm, with zoom level somehow taken into account (distance of dots maybe)?<p>Then one could, in a computer game, for example look at a brick wall. At first, as one is further back, the surface from tiles look somewhat matte smooth. But when one gets closer, the features become more and more coarse with more and more detail, eventually even some tiny tiny holes in the surface are visible, and so on.<p>Another example: sand, it looks smooth from afar but as one zooms in, actual grains of sand become visible.