MosaicBricks

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 21:30:07 -0500

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted here mainly because I’ve not had much to write about. Last fall my basement flooded and it’s taken this long to get everything back together. In the move, almost all my pieces of LEGO artwork were damaged - not by the water, but by the inept movers. Sigh.

So, the huge steam train mosaic I’ve been working on needs a lot of repair. I can’t decide whether it’s worth the effort to try and put it back together for BrickFair in 6 months time - it’s that badly broken.

But enough of that.

I recent discovered a new web site dedicated to LEGO mosaics - MosaicBricks. It’s a great site with lots of content all about LEGO mosaics. I’ve only read through a few articles (of which there are many) but I’ve already seen some truly creative techniques. Katie, one of the bloggers, kindly featured my work in a couple of articles here and here. Please check out her site - it’s well worth the time...

Brickfair 2011 Setup Day 1

Thu, 4 Aug 2011 23:32:14 -0400

I can’t believe it’s been a year since my last blog post - crazy. Anyway, my pictures from the first day of BrickFair 2011 are located here.

This year I’m exhibiting some of my pieces. So far, so good - I got them there in one piece.

BrickFAIR 2010

Wed, 8 Sep 2010 07:11:17 -0400

Just posted my snaps from BrickFair 2010. They can be found here.

New color palette for lego mosaics

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:36:32 -0500

Hi again. Well, I’ve finally built a few pieces now using the new color palette so it’s time to tell you about it. First, you can get the palette for use with PicToBricks at this link here. Simply unzip and copy the file in to your PicToBricks temporary folder and it should show up when you “Load Configuration”.

After working on the “aqua” mosaics that gave shades of color by stacking transparent plates vertically I was happy that the idea worked. But....I wanted color. So, I started noodling around with a similar idea - this time stacking various transparent plates on top of the normal 1x1 bricks. The idea was that placing various transparent pieces on top of the solid colors you could get different shades of the base color. I even had the thought that you could simulate other colors, e.g. purple, by putting colored transparent pieces on top of the bricks. So, for example, you might put a transparent-red plate on top of a blue brick and get a purple color.

I started out by making a test target like the one on the left. After trying various transparent pieces including colored ones, I decided to keep it simple and use two variations - 1x1 transparent plates and 1x1 transparent-black tiles. My hope was The DSC-H50 has all sorts of automatic features including various color settings like “vivid”, “realistic”, and “antique”. The default setting is “normal” which actually does apply some color correction. I switched to the “real” setting to avoid tainting the results.
Similarly, the camera also has “white balance” settings and flash exposure settings. Again, I tried to neutralize these as much as possible.
A better solution would be to use a camera that supports RAW and work with the bits direct from the camera’s CCD.that these would give two extra shades of each color effectively tripling the number of colors available.

After building the target, I then took a picture of it with my digital camera [Sony DSC-H50 : nice, but nothing fancy]. Using Apple’s Aperture program I fixed the white balance which was off due to the incandescent lights that illuminated the target. Next, the image went to Photoshop.

But first, an aside. The ultimate goal in this exercise was to get a list of RGB values that I could plug into a PicToBricks configuration so that it could do the quantization of the source images using my new color palette. But how do you generate the RGB values? My idea was that I could take a digital picture of the bricks with various plates and then somehow use Photoshop to get me the RGB values.

Back to the action. The idea I’d had to get the RGB values was to use the “mosaic” filter in Photoshop to average out the pixels for each 1x1 brick which would give me the approximate RGB value for each brick. Here’s where I ran into a small snag. If you look closely at the target the bricks aren’t perfectly square - themselves or square to each other. The problem is that the Mosaic filter works on a NxN grid where N is the size of each mosaic element. Since the bricks weren’t square some overlapped into their neighbors and corrupted the neighbor’s RGB value. After trying fruitlessly to fix the problem by physically arranging the bricks better I took the cheap way out and fixed it in Photoshop. I took NxN pixel chunks of each brick and arranged them in a grid like the one on the left. In most cases I could clip out any offending overlap or fill in the occasional gap. Of course, to avoid skewing the results too badly I tried to minimize these patches.
Another snag I ran into was lighting. I wasn’t using any professional lighting equipment so if the target was too tall or too wide it was very difficult to get consistent lighting across the entire target. Furthermore, if there were too many plates stacked on top of the bricks they started to cast shadows on neighboring bricks which obviously would effect the final colors.

Once the image of the target was assembled I ran the mosaic filter on it the output of which is on the right. Cool - shades! To get the RGB values of these colors I simply scrubbed each block in Photoshop and read off the data from the Info palette. In doing so I noticed that many of the shades were very close to each other. As a result the final palette has fewer colors that you see here because I removed the “duplicates”. For example, many of the bricks covered with the trans-black tiles look almost the same.

With the list of RGB values in hand, the next step was to create a PicToBricks configuration file. This is a bit tedious but didn’t take too long. You can download the configuration file here:

http://doug-and-dana.com/webroot/Photos/BAGGADONUTS_EXTENDED_01.cfg.zip

All that was left to do was create a mosaic using the palette. I decided to go with another portrait. The first panel of the pieces is shown on the left. The image I chose wasn’t full of bright colors but had subtle shading that I hoped the new palette would bring out. Even with just 32x32 bricks you can see that the extra plates are giving some extra shades. Encouraged, I quickly finished the next baseplate.

The image to the left shows the second baseplate beneath the first. I must admit I was quite surprised at how well the palette was working. The extra light and dark shades seemed to make a huge difference.

The close up on the right shows the added plates and tiles.

The final two pieces didn’t take too long and in a few nights I was looking at the final piece shown below. It’s hard to see in the pictures but the shading is quite remarkable.

I was thinking about doing the same image with my old palette for comparison but I decided to try a different test. I started a fresh portrait using the new palette but left off the extra places and tiles.

The image to the left shows the portrait without the extras. Notice the dark green standing out. The image to the right shows the portrait with the extras added. Quite a big difference and the green is completely hidden and gives a shade of “gray”.
I think a side-by-side comparison of the old palette vs. the new one would be even more startling.

Great - but there’s a snag...

I'm not sure if you know how much transparent-black 1x1 tiles cost, I didn’t...but I do now. Let’s just say they’re expensive [ more than 10¢ per tile] so many images just use too many to be practical. For these images, I created a copy of the palette with many of the colors using the tiles removed. The results aren’t as good as with the tiles but still better than the old palette. Bright Pink and Dark Purple are also in this new palette. Depending on your images and your budget you may want to remove those colors too.

Well, that’s about it. It’s taken almost six months but I finally have my new color palette. Yea! Some day I’ll finish the deal and add more permutations of adding colored transparent pieces but for now this is fine.

Please download the palette if you want to try it out. I’d love to see your results!

- doug

In Progress - Color 3-D Mosaic, Part 3

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 02:02:12 -0500

In the first back light test it was revealed that the framework of transparent panels, bricks, and plates wasn’t transparent enough and was blocking enough light to be seen.

Darn!

So, I’ve spent the last two weeks rebuilding, tearing down, and re-rebuilding the framework that holds the mosaic vertically.

I think I’ve finally found a good setup and so it’s coming a long quite nicely. Should be done in a week or two. In the mean time, more “in progress” shots are here.

BUILDING The creations

MosaicBricks

Brickfair 2011 Setup Day 1

BrickFAIR 2010

New color palette for lego mosaics

In Progress - Color 3-D Mosaic, Part 3