Hi! This looks really cool! I've seen that you reference the aarthificial-video that describes how to use lookup-textures for pixel art animation. Do you already have tools/scripts ready to make this simpler? I have my lookup-texture and original animations/texture atlases, but would need to convert them into the images whose red and green channels make up the coordinate to look for in the look-up texture

Hi! Thanks for the positive feedback!

There are two functions in the scripting API that you may want to have a look at:

• $Graphics.gen_lookup(image source, bool dim) -> image - Generates an intermediate lookup map that replaces all the non-transparent pixels in source with a unique RGB color
• $Graphics.uv_mapping(image texture, image map, image animation) -> image - Generates a textured animation of the same shape as animation. texture is a texture atlas. map is an intermediate lookup map of the same shape as texture, potentially one generated by $Graphics.gen_lookup().

An updated example of this workflow is described on the preview scripts page of the program’s documentation.

The UV mapping is generated by iterating over every pixel in animation. For every non-transparent pixel at ax, ay with the color ac, the algorithm looks for the pixel coordinates of the color ac in map, which we will call mx, my. Each color in map should occur exactly once. The algorithm then samples the color at mx, my in texture, which we will call tc. The color tc is then assigned to the pixel at ax, ay of the result image. Not that this is not exactly like aarthificial’s implementation, where the red and green color channels of pixels in the lookup map encode pixel coordinate data.

Here are a couple of video tutorials you can check out if you haven’t come across them yet:

• Rotating heads example
• Flag example

They are slightly outdated, should still help you understand the how to achieve this in Stipple Effect. Notably, the older video (flag example) uses the functions gen_lookup() and tex_col_repl() instead of $Graphics.gen_lookup() and $Graphics.uv_mapping().

I plan on creating updated tutorials and to go into more depth with scripting tutorials in the near future.

I hope that answers your question! Let me know if it didn’t or if I can help you further! Have you had a chance to use Stipple Effect? Also, feel free to send me your assets and let me know if you’d like me to write you up a script for your particular use case to get you up and running.

A visualization of $Graphics.uv_mapping(texture, LOOKUP_TEX, LOOKUP_ANIM):

(Ignore differences in scale)

texture:

LOOKUP_TEX:

LOOKUP_ANIM:

result:

As of now, there is no way to get around setting up the image that acts as the animation argument in $Graphics.uv_mapping() by hand. Watch from 4:24 to 6:15 of the flag example video for an example of how I transformed a lookup texture into an animation made up of its colors.