4x4 Ordered dithering (blend file included)

Artwork Blender Tests
1

Time for another node test: I played around the idea about doing proper dithering completely inside blender just by using compositing nodes and here’s the result:

Rendered at 160x200 (honoring c64 double wide pixel aspect):

The dithering uses ordered 4x4 matrix implemented via math nodes, it’s probably the least effective way of doing this but hey, it can be done!

It would be really cool to actually fit the end result to a fixed palette but doing with plain math nodes would be a total performance killer and i’m open to alternative ways to handle it inside compositor nodes.

The compositor nodes have a switch to show external images if you want to just test the output:

And here’s a comparison image between the rendering and output:

b28_4x4_positiona_dither.jpg2652×1158 328 KB

And finally here’s the blend file: http://xard.mbnet.fi/blenderartists/b28_4x4_positional_dither.blend

2019-01-19 Update:

  • Fixed silly bug in the compositor nodes which added the glare over images.
  • Fixed last dithering brightness step which didn’t include 1.00
  • Blend file is now compressed dropping its size to half (whoops)
12 Likes
2

Very nice… I got nice C64 vibes straight away.

I’ve looked at your nodetree, I see your dithering hue and value, but no saturation, which is interesting.

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Yeah, the last test image containing comparison doesn’t yet have saturation dithering. Actually I tried to get away with static saturation as it would provide real 16 color palette, but there just wasn’t a good single value to stick.I had to fall back to dithered saturation which provides coarse 64 colors.

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There’s no direct palitisingness on Blender… I did make this for C64-ising video a little while ago (the video is the late great C64 and folk musician Ben Daglish)

image
image1920×1080 319 KB

5

Splitting tones and merging them with help of Hue from hsv. That’s actually quite clever way of approaching the problem.

Also nice work with the tribute. Bens music is quite amazing indeed.

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sorry for bump, but the link is dead and the picture for the node graph is blurry and i cant see what the nodes are.
I really wanna make this c64 stuff too… thanks

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Is anybody able to upload the blend file for this? the link has expired and this is just what i have been trying to do for my art project LOL :slight_smile: thnx

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bumping this, would love to be able to explore the original file !

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As my file hosting service decided to pull the plug and I think I took all the backups before that…

Luckily I managed to find a later version which I modified a bit to work in the latest blender:

1 Like
10

Just stumbled across this, great work!
Is there a possibility to make the pixels not stretched in the x direction?
Looked through your node tree and was overwhelmed…