Stained Glass Effect (using VB6 and GIMP)

I wanted to title this article “a novel method for matrix randomization using polygons and custom differential post-processing blending“… but that was a bit long, even for me.

Why such a complex title?

It all started with a strange idea I had today.  I was thinking of common ways to randomize image data (don’t ask why), and it struck me that the most common randomization method – varying RGB data of single pixels – is not the most interesting way to go about it.  Why not use lines, triangles, or other polygons to randomize an image?  How would that look?

To test my theory, I wrote a quick program that selects two random pixels in an image, averages their colors, then draws a line of that averaged color between the two points. When repeated over and over again, such an algorithm leads to some interesting effects…

I started with this God of War 3 image...

...and got this (100,000 iterations of lines with max length 42).

Here's the same image, but with lines of max length 85.

Kinda cool.  I’m not sure what to call this effect… although it looks “furry” to me.  Should we invent a new word – furrification?

Once I had lines working, my next curiosity involved polygons.  Here’s the same picture, but with triangle randomization:

Same parameters as the first line-based randomization above (100,000 iterations, 42 max length).

Same parameters as the second line-based image above (100,000 iterations, max length 85)

This is also a cool effect, especially when you watch it in action.  (The program refreshes the screen every 100 iterations.)

While I didn’t go to the trouble of implementing additional polygons, the code is primed and ready for it.  In fact, it would be trivial to draw polygons of any segment count.

Once I had my newly randomized images, I decided to pop into GIMP and do a bit of post-processing.  It was then that I realized this could be used to create pretty sweet stained glass images:

Sweet!

It’s trivial to create an image like this – simply open up your base image, then add a triangle randomized copy over the top as a new layer.  Set the layer mode to “difference” and bam: stained glass!

Same effect, but with a larger triangle size.

Other blending modes provide interesting effects – for example, multiply:

Same two images as the first stained glass example - just the blending mode has changed.

Anyway, I thought this was an interesting exploration in using a randomized copy of an image as an overlay.

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