omino pixel blog

Early this month, we visited the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles, featuring patterns and clothing by the Hawaiian designer Alfred Shaheen. Great stuff! Yeah, I have a closet full of Hawaiian shirts.

(Show show goes til August 8, worth visiting. On the first Friday of the month, many of the galleries on First Street in San Jose, CA are open late, definitely a nice night out.)

Since I adore repetition, and halftoning, I got to wondering if I could recreate some of the patterns programmatically. The “Omino Stamper” filter runs in After Effects and attempts to do this.

download ==> omino_stamp.pbk, an After Effects filter.

The idea is pretty simple: draw a “stamp image” in a pattern which can be affected by the source image. It’s a little bit like a particle effect, but more mechanical.

Here’s the controls and few examples, which look nothing like Hawaiian shirts.

A quick rundown:

• The pattern- settings adjust the stamping grid
• The stamp- settings adjust orientation and size of the stampimage image
• The stampOverlaps setting controls how many nearby stamps are computed for each pixel; slows down the render a bit but is necessary for closely-spaced stamping. (If you see missing corners and such, increase this setting. (Those of you familiar with Pixel Bender will immediately apprehend why this is so. 🙂
• The affectsStampSizeAmount, affectsStampColorAmount, and affectsStampRotationAmount settings control the halftoning features of the filter.

Here’s a basic stamp:

Next, we adjust the bricking a little, to make it less square-y:

And let the color of the underlying image affect the stamp color:

How about affect the rotation, instead of the color? Kinda wild:

Or back to basics, let the underlying image affect the stamping-size:

Here’s a festive little animation playing with the effect a bit, and does include a Tiki god or two.

download ==> omino_stamp.pbk, an After Effects filter.

Enjoy!