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hey gaf, i thought i'd share this little mega man art project i just finished
- Thread starter jarosh
- Start date
BruceLeeRoy
Banned
Jarosh that is truly awesome man. Great great job.
vagabondarts
Member
I Love Megaman
I Love creative projects
I LOVE THIS!!!!
great work, and it looks stellar hanging on the wall!
I Love creative projects
I LOVE THIS!!!!
great work, and it looks stellar hanging on the wall!
Micromegas
Member
Came in here with low expectations, but I'm blown away. Well done, sir.
beelzebozo
Jealous Bastard
Dali said:
it's not as impressive when you do it with garfield
edit: just read where you did it with garfield :/
do not question the bossitude present in this project!
Choppasmith
Member
I happened to see this on GNintendo yesterday. Didn't know it was you Jarosh. Wow! Amazing work. You have not only blown me away earning much respect and admiration. You've definitely inspired me to press on with my Mega Man craft project which I'm hoping to reveal here on GAF when it's finished.
SpacePirate Ridley
Member
You know there are pieces of art at modern museusm and galleries that are complete shit if you compared them with the work you have done, no?
Its made of epic win, sir!
Its made of epic win, sir!
Sir Garbageman
Member
Amazing, amazing piece of art OP.
Just out of curiosity do you work in graphic design or in some other artistic field? If you don't looks like you should. Damn.
Just out of curiosity do you work in graphic design or in some other artistic field? If you don't looks like you should. Damn.
corrosivefrost
Member
Sweet zombie Jesus and all that's holy!
Amazing.
Amazing.
well, i can't argue with anyone about whether this is impressive or not. the end result might as well not be. i had my doubts as well at some point and wasn't sure if i should really go ahead with the print... however, i wanna get one thing out of the way: it was not a matter of pointing a software to a folder with screenshots, clicking a button and being done with it. it was a laborious and sometimes tedious project that took me several weeks to finish. and i'm not just saying that. it was also a lot of fun though and i loved every minute of it.
let me elaborate a bit on the whole process. this is the short version of what i did :
- create the template with the mega man sprite on a white background
- determining/calculating the exact amount of pixels/tiles that would be necessary since i didn't want duplicates OR have too many screenshots, which would have meant that some stages would be missing from the final product
- taking about ~250 screenshots per game (automated for each game obviously)
- sorting through all the screenshots, deleting bad ones
- determining the tile length and width and finding a compromise between square tiles and 4:3 tiles, the original aspect ratio of the screens (which would have made the sprite too wide)
- batch cropping all the screenhots several times to a custom resolution until i found the perfect middle ground
- resizing and stretching the sprite template to the correct size and pixel/tile aspect ratio
- realizing that most mosaic software does not allow custom tile aspect ratios
- testing out about 10 different mosaic creators until i realized i would have to create my own mask in andrea mosaic (a way around the aspect ratio limitations)
- creating a mask for the mega man sprite only (this tells the software exactly what's supposed to be a tile and what isn't), after it was decided that i wouldn't have the software render the background together with the sprite (never looked good, there were always artifact tiles around the sprite, a result of how the software interprets the mask)
- i just wanna make sure that this part is clear: mosaic software is usually not used to render a picture where every tile equals a square (oversized pixel) of one solid color. tiles are normally an artificial part of the mosaic equation, introduced at the last stage of the creation, as photographs or any other common images are not made up of arbitrary square shaped units x times the size of an actual pixel. so the software usually treats the tiles as the lesser part of the mosaic, resizing them and squishing them as needed, color correcting the hell out of them, rotating and mirroring them etc. the quality of the tiles usually suffer as a result. but i needed, WANTED a pixel perfect copy of the input tile, with no resizing or blurring and no excessive color correction applied. it took me a long time to figure out how to overcome this and how to make the result look exactly the way i wanted. go ahead and try it, it takes lots of calculations, trial and error, you even have to compensate for some of the limitations and bugs encountered in the rendering. this part was a major pain for me and almost made me give up. i could get deeper into the technicalities but i think it's kinda pointless...
- after countless iterations of mosaics with minor color and tile differences i decided i'd have to manually switch out tiles that looked off (remember: mosaics are usually composed of a lot more, much more heavily altered tiles so that's not a common a problem)
- editing, color correcting, switching out hundreds of tiles by hand until i was happy with the end result
- rendering the mosaic background... oh god i don't even wanna get into this. let's just say: i ended up having to re-arrange A LOT OF TILES end i went through a lot of different backgrounds and combinations of mosaics
- did i mention that i sorted half the screenshots by hue and luminance at some point when i realized no software was able to pick the right screenshots for the sprites when rendering it separate from the background? and then i had to do the same thing again and get rid of the really dark screenshots for the background
- then there were two rows of screenshots with boss weaknesses... each screenshot was a composite of a background and hand picked and placed sprites to illustrate the correct weapon for the correct boss form (you actually see mega man fight with the respective weapon, this was all done by hand)... for mm10 i even had to sort of guess half of the pixel art and draw it myself (at that point there were only a handful of incomplete sprite rips). just the boos weakness screenshots took me another week.
- then there's the boxart and cartridge gallery at the bottom... yeah. a lot of work. maybe it doesn't look like it but it was. all the cartridges for example are composites of the same high resolution cartridge photo (i wanted all of them to look the same) and the highest resolution label i could find plus a lot of color correction, stretching, warping etc. two of the labels i had to recreate from different pieces of artwork because there was no good hi-res version out there.
- general photoshop clean-up work on the whole thing... bleh. i dunno. maybe 5 hours?
actually, i only scratched the surface with this. i left out so many details, a lot of problems with the mosaic that sent me back to the drawing board, that had me start from scratch again several times. even most of the seemingly simple steps required a lot of trial and error until everything worked and looked the way i wanted (this required 7.4 gb of data, ~13'000 files). i'm a perfectionist and when i know i'll be spending a lot of money on something like this, i make sure that everything really IS perfect (at least to me).
again, whatever you think about the end result - and i really don't mind criticism - all i wanted with this post was to clear up that this is not just "a mosaic spit out by some software, finished in a matter of minutes". i mean, i was ready to declare the whole thing a failure at one point, i started to hate even looking at the thing because it had taken me so long to finish and it seemed like i had completely lost my objectivity.
right now i'm just glad it's done. and i'm actually surprised how happy i am with the end result
let me elaborate a bit on the whole process. this is the short version of what i did :
- create the template with the mega man sprite on a white background
- determining/calculating the exact amount of pixels/tiles that would be necessary since i didn't want duplicates OR have too many screenshots, which would have meant that some stages would be missing from the final product
- taking about ~250 screenshots per game (automated for each game obviously)
- sorting through all the screenshots, deleting bad ones
- determining the tile length and width and finding a compromise between square tiles and 4:3 tiles, the original aspect ratio of the screens (which would have made the sprite too wide)
- batch cropping all the screenhots several times to a custom resolution until i found the perfect middle ground
- resizing and stretching the sprite template to the correct size and pixel/tile aspect ratio
- realizing that most mosaic software does not allow custom tile aspect ratios
- testing out about 10 different mosaic creators until i realized i would have to create my own mask in andrea mosaic (a way around the aspect ratio limitations)
- creating a mask for the mega man sprite only (this tells the software exactly what's supposed to be a tile and what isn't), after it was decided that i wouldn't have the software render the background together with the sprite (never looked good, there were always artifact tiles around the sprite, a result of how the software interprets the mask)
- i just wanna make sure that this part is clear: mosaic software is usually not used to render a picture where every tile equals a square (oversized pixel) of one solid color. tiles are normally an artificial part of the mosaic equation, introduced at the last stage of the creation, as photographs or any other common images are not made up of arbitrary square shaped units x times the size of an actual pixel. so the software usually treats the tiles as the lesser part of the mosaic, resizing them and squishing them as needed, color correcting the hell out of them, rotating and mirroring them etc. the quality of the tiles usually suffer as a result. but i needed, WANTED a pixel perfect copy of the input tile, with no resizing or blurring and no excessive color correction applied. it took me a long time to figure out how to overcome this and how to make the result look exactly the way i wanted. go ahead and try it, it takes lots of calculations, trial and error, you even have to compensate for some of the limitations and bugs encountered in the rendering. this part was a major pain for me and almost made me give up. i could get deeper into the technicalities but i think it's kinda pointless...
- after countless iterations of mosaics with minor color and tile differences i decided i'd have to manually switch out tiles that looked off (remember: mosaics are usually composed of a lot more, much more heavily altered tiles so that's not a common a problem)
- editing, color correcting, switching out hundreds of tiles by hand until i was happy with the end result
- rendering the mosaic background... oh god i don't even wanna get into this. let's just say: i ended up having to re-arrange A LOT OF TILES end i went through a lot of different backgrounds and combinations of mosaics
- did i mention that i sorted half the screenshots by hue and luminance at some point when i realized no software was able to pick the right screenshots for the sprites when rendering it separate from the background? and then i had to do the same thing again and get rid of the really dark screenshots for the background
- then there were two rows of screenshots with boss weaknesses... each screenshot was a composite of a background and hand picked and placed sprites to illustrate the correct weapon for the correct boss form (you actually see mega man fight with the respective weapon, this was all done by hand)... for mm10 i even had to sort of guess half of the pixel art and draw it myself (at that point there were only a handful of incomplete sprite rips). just the boos weakness screenshots took me another week.
- then there's the boxart and cartridge gallery at the bottom... yeah. a lot of work. maybe it doesn't look like it but it was. all the cartridges for example are composites of the same high resolution cartridge photo (i wanted all of them to look the same) and the highest resolution label i could find plus a lot of color correction, stretching, warping etc. two of the labels i had to recreate from different pieces of artwork because there was no good hi-res version out there.
- general photoshop clean-up work on the whole thing... bleh. i dunno. maybe 5 hours?
actually, i only scratched the surface with this. i left out so many details, a lot of problems with the mosaic that sent me back to the drawing board, that had me start from scratch again several times. even most of the seemingly simple steps required a lot of trial and error until everything worked and looked the way i wanted (this required 7.4 gb of data, ~13'000 files). i'm a perfectionist and when i know i'll be spending a lot of money on something like this, i make sure that everything really IS perfect (at least to me).
again, whatever you think about the end result - and i really don't mind criticism - all i wanted with this post was to clear up that this is not just "a mosaic spit out by some software, finished in a matter of minutes". i mean, i was ready to declare the whole thing a failure at one point, i started to hate even looking at the thing because it had taken me so long to finish and it seemed like i had completely lost my objectivity.
right now i'm just glad it's done. and i'm actually surprised how happy i am with the end result
ok, for everyone who just clicked on this thread for the first time: you can safely ignore my previous, way too long post up there. this one is probably more interesting
here's where i "hid" my two cats:
for reference:
their actual names are aljosha (or short: yoshi) & minu. but most of the time we call them "little man" and "minu beans" respectively for some reason.
here's where i "hid" my two cats:
for reference:
their actual names are aljosha (or short: yoshi) & minu. but most of the time we call them "little man" and "minu beans" respectively for some reason.
beelzebozo
Jealous Bastard
:lol
jarosh said:ok, for everyone who just clicked on this thread for the first time: you can safely ignore my previous, way too long post up there. this one is probably more interesting
here's where i "hid" my two cats:
Am I the only one who think Hard Man should have been placed between the two pussies?
Hypereides
Member
beelzebozo said:
gigaton of :lol
beelzebozo
Jealous Bastard
thought for sure you'd somehow use this to fit in your cats
+%5B!%5D_006.png)
but your way was actually better
but your way was actually better
i got a pm titled "capcom loves you"
apparently it's gonna be on the capcom blog today! (thanks, seth!)
i figured i'd post the entirety of the boss weakness screenshots:
it kinda breaks the page, sorry for that, but it's not even full res.
the screenshot in the top left corner with dr. light's message is kind of an homage to the engrishy/sloppy translations in the early mega man games. "the evil domination of dr. wily" is lifted straight from mega man 1.
the numbers you see above mega man's head in some of the shots are the amount of damage the respective weapon does. i only added them when there's two or more different weapons that could be considered weaknesses that do different amounts of damage.
of course i didn't have any direct feed screens of the mm9 and mm10 wily bosses so i just used the fortress backdrop, weapon sprites and numbers.
apparently it's gonna be on the capcom blog today! (thanks, seth!)
i figured i'd post the entirety of the boss weakness screenshots:
it kinda breaks the page, sorry for that, but it's not even full res.
the screenshot in the top left corner with dr. light's message is kind of an homage to the engrishy/sloppy translations in the early mega man games. "the evil domination of dr. wily" is lifted straight from mega man 1.
the numbers you see above mega man's head in some of the shots are the amount of damage the respective weapon does. i only added them when there's two or more different weapons that could be considered weaknesses that do different amounts of damage.
of course i didn't have any direct feed screens of the mm9 and mm10 wily bosses so i just used the fortress backdrop, weapon sprites and numbers.
The Dutch Slayer
Member
Told you Capcom unity is cool is that way to fans!jarosh said:i got a pm titled "capcom loves you"
apparently it's gonna be on the capcom blog today! (thanks, seth!)
Great job man
Shao Kahn Brewing a Stew
Banned
BADASS! OMEGA BADASS! You, my friend, are a great inspiration!
Nose Master
Member
Beautiful. I wish I had the patience to make something like this. Also: this has inspired me to go play more MM10.
i did see the printer and we talked a bit about the whole printing process but i couldn't tell you exactly what model it was. sorry. i think the maximum width is 200 cm, iirc.Burger said:Do you know anything else about the print process and type of printer they used ? I do wide format stuff for a living, and I'm just curious.
Nice print btw
ok, last time i'm bumping this thing... just wanted to point out that it got posted on the capcom blog:
http://www.capcom-unity.com/s-kill/blog/2010/04/09/epic_mega_man_mosaic_made_from_100_win
yay!
http://www.capcom-unity.com/s-kill/blog/2010/04/09/epic_mega_man_mosaic_made_from_100_win
yay!
lulz kotaku. Nice source link.
http://kotaku.com/5514245/mega-man-mosaic-made-of-mega-man-screens
http://kotaku.com/5514245/mega-man-mosaic-made-of-mega-man-screens
Shao Kahn Brewing a Stew
Banned
alr1ghtstart said:
Fucking Kotaku! :lol
MikeE21286
Member
Holy fucking shit that is awesome
Segata Sanshiro
Member
I know you said you aren't planning on profiting from it but god damn I would buy a poster of that in a New York minute.
Absolutely fucking stellar work, jarosh.
Absolutely fucking stellar work, jarosh.
TheVisualizer
Banned
most impressive
