Puppy

It's day 23 of Thingadailies!

Foster Updates

Not much change from yesterday for anyone. I did convince Lulu to eat a little tonight, but there's still something not right about her. If she's not doing well in the morning, I'll see if I can bring her in with Gnocchi for an expert opinion (or at least drugs to make her comfortable while we figure out what's going on...)

Puppy Vectors

Today I wanted to see how hard it would be to convert a real life image into vectors. That way I wouldn't have to either create or purchase vector images, especially for things I already have pictures of. I don't mind purchasing vector assets, but it becomes a problem when they aren't all in the same style. If I create the vector assets, I can control that.

This was the picture I was playing with, a puppy named Taylor that I drove over to Sacramento last year:

So, how hard is it to vectorize an image? Not hard at all, but... It defaults to breaking it down to so many tiny vectors that it looks like a raster image, so if you put it in a book cover with a bunch of vector objects, it looks like a bad photoshop job. The image below is technically a vector, but it might as well be a raster image.

What I really wanted was a more simplified version of the puppy. I feel like there's probably an easy way to do this, but I haven't quite figured it out.

I ended up going over to GIMP and choosing Image->Mode->Indexed..., which will create a palette with however many colors you specify. Then I pulled that image with fewer colors into Affinity and vectorized it using Vector->Image Trace...

There are two settings in Image Trace which control how exact a copy it will try to make. I tweaked the dials until I could get something recognizable while also being simplified. I also didn't try to clean anything up afterward, so they could probably be improved.

Results

10-color palette:

12-color palette:

16-color palette:

32-color palette:

I think 10 lost definition of the nose, and 32 looked too close to a photo. I could probably live with either 12 (after some cleanup) or 16.

Anyhow, it was an interesting exercise, and probably the real message is that you should pay artists. But this is fun, too, and I can probably get reasonably results if I spend some time on it.