Pseudo Vectorized Look.

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Pseudo Vectorized Look.

This is a kind of tutorial showing the most basic operations to get a Vectorized Hand Made look. This tutorial was made in shake but is intended to be easily converted to another compositing package like Fusion or Nuke.

view high res here

The main tool here is the ColorX Node, ( In fusion and Nuke Custom tool), Driven by 2 custom Variables Called LoVal and HiVal.

This is a overall look of the finished script>

Well, Lets get Started.

• First We need a File In of an HD image or better ( Using this technique in low res images could works but with low quality edges ).Then We Add a setDOD node ( Could be another but with this is simple ) and add 2 Local ( or custom) Variables.We call This Variables loVal and hiVal. Now your tree should look like this>

• Now We need to make our file to an standardized size . Using this we can handle the same filtering values , with any kind of image size. So next, add a resize node and resize it to 1444 square. ( I take this value random but it works fine with the rest of the script ).

• Well Now here is the place where the magic comes. We need to add 3 ColorX Nodes coming from the setDOD node, we may call this Low Mid and High like this>

We are going to add some expression to this ColorX nodes. The main idea is to create alittle rig control like the "Levels" Control used in photoshop ( Not really the same thing but is a little bit illustrative).



What We are going to do is to create a hard Color Filtering than reduce the full image in basically 3 color descriptors Low Mid and High Tones , you can see it this way >



Our Expresion will take color ranges from loVal to hiVal and Mix together in one Mask the low tones, in another mask the mids and in another the high ones.

• Ok, before star creating these expressions rename the setDOD node to main.

• Then Start by adding this expression ont the Low ColorX node, in the rExpr compononet.

r>main7.loVal&r<((main.hiVal-main.loVal)/3)?1:0

• and the same for gExpr and bExpr only replacing the literal r for the corresponding channel

g>main7.loVal&g<((main.hiVal-main.loVal)/3)?1:0
b>main7.loVal&b<((main.hiVal-main.loVal)/3)?1:0 if you are getting error messages here check that you have the loVal and hiVal Custom variables inside the main (after setDOD) node

Your color X node might look like this.



Well lets get inside this expression.

We can break this in 3 parts because we are making a logical comparission ( in other words an IF ELSE operation). So the first part is the comparison (beofre the ? character) second the option A result ( before : character) and Third the option B so...

r>main7.loVal&r<((main.hiVal-main.loVal)/3)
?
1 : 0
We can read it as
if red value is higher than Main loVal and lower than one third part of hiVal
use 1
else use 0

So for example if
loVal=0
hiVal=1

any value in r between 0 and .3333 will be turned in 1 else will be 0

This way we are mixing all range from 0 to .3 and creating a solid mask that represents 1/3 part of the full color range inside this image. in this case the lower colors


So as you can imagine the expression to mid and high tones will be very similars only changing the min and max clippin values.

These are the expression>

Mid colorX

rExpr
r>(((main7.hiVal-main7.loVal)/3))+.0001&r<(((main7.hiVal-main7.loVal)/3)*2)?1:0 gExpr g>(((main7.hiVal-main7.loVal)/3))+.0001&g<(((main7.hiVal-main7.loVal)/3)*2)?1:0 bExpr b>(((main7.hiVal-main7.loVal)/3))+.0001&b<(((main7.hiVal-main7.loVal)/3)*2)?1:0


High colorX


this way our source image

will be breaked in


highs


mids


lows

• At this point we are generating full RGB images with restricted ranges in low,mid and high, but we need to convert this to a grayscale image. For this, i suggest to add a
• Monochrome node in the mid colorX node and then add another 2 linked copies of thi to the low and high colorX controls. like this>

If everything is working fine you are pretty done, the rest of the script is too much intuituve. You can check the script is working fine adding a grayscale generator and looking at each of the colorX nodes to see the corresponding low mid an high tone ranges.


high weighted map

mid weighted map


low weighted map