WoW Mosaics

[lacitpo]

hah, sorry i was on holidays for a few.
How many icons do you have? i'm using a pool of about 4600 which i slowly crawled from the armory :/

I downloaded an icon pack from somewhere out there on the internet. 6003 icons. I should probably remove the black icon because I totally agree with the cheating point. It was something I did in an afternoon for fun-sies. On the same line, I scraped 4chan images for 48 hours and have a 15,000 size image library to make mosaics out of nothing but porn which is extremely hilarious. I've got my first image processed this morning. PM me if you'd like a link. The picture is pretty much safe for work as long as you don't zoom in :P

[Zub]

I downloaded an icon pack from somewhere out there on the internet. 6003 icons. I should probably remove the black icon because I totally agree with the cheating point. It was something I did in an afternoon for fun-sies. On the same line, I scraped 4chan images for 48 hours and have a 15,000 size image library to make mosaics out of nothing but porn which is extremely hilarious. I've got my first image processed this morning. PM me if you'd like a link. The picture is pretty much safe for work as long as you don't zoom in :P

actually i wouldn't mind a link to the pack of 6k wow icons ;-)
Is that available in all sizes? 21/32/43/51/64 ?

[thmsn]

Thats pretty cool, how do you map each icon to the color of a pixel?, I haven't worked much with image manipulation so this is rather interresting

[Zub]

Thats pretty cool, how do you map each icon to the color of a pixel?, I haven't worked much with image manipulation so this is rather interresting

The way i do it (which is not exactly very smart) is that for each icon of the pool I have, i pick a number of sample pixels and average them.

For example, for each icon that is 21x21 (441 pixels) i pick ~30-40 pixels at regular intervals and for each i record the Red, Green and Blue values.
Then I average up all reds, all greens and all blues separately and I get my average RGB color for that icon.

I store all that info in a database, and then, when i parse the pixels of the image to render, i select the 'closest' matching icon by comparing the R, G and B values.
the closest is basically the one with the smallest difference = ( (Abs(Ricon - Rimage) + Abs(Gicon-Gimage) + Abs(Bicon-Bimage) )

As I said, not exactly very precise, but it work reasonably so far. In a future version i might try and map areas (left, top, right, bottom) and have separate RGB averages for each of those to try and make the images smoother. But it feels like alot of work and I can't be asked so far ;-)

[lacitpo]

I found i got slightly better images if I treaded the RGB values as a vector in 3d(R3 space) and used distance formula to find the 1 dimensional distance between the two vectors. The difference was small but noticable.

IE: distance = sqrt( (Roriginal-Ricon)^2 + (Goriginal-Gicon)^2 + (Boriginal-Bicon)^2 )

The other thing I did a bit different from you was rather than go on a pixel by pixel basis to analyze my original image, I used a larger block of pixel. Instead of averaging the entire icon as a single RGB value, I analized it as a 4x4 grid of RGB values, in effect, simplifying it to a 4x4 pixel image. I then compared those 4x4 values to a 4x4 block of values to my image being mosaic'd and used the same vector formula, but in a 48-dimensional way to find the closest match.

Here's the icon pack. I've hosted it myself cause I can't find the original. http://video.cliffmonkeys.com/WoW_wExp1-2_Icons.zip

[Zub]

Thanks for the icons!
they are much better quality than mine it seems (funny since i actually got mine from the armory) with a neat black border instead of my crappy brown/changing one.
Pity they are only in 40x40

Good tip on the formula, i'll give it a try when i have time. just got myself taken into another web project... for babies. >.<