The artwork that you see in my gallery has been created by a parse/render workflow system that has been - and continues to be - in continuous development (by yours truly) since April 2004.

My interest in creating three-dimensional representations of classic arcade, console and computer game characters sprung from a fairly fruitless web search for a retro-arcade-based desktop for my iMac. When I couldn't find anything to fit the bill I set about creating my own, using sprites grabbed from emulated screenshots of my favourite games. One problem....

....the low resolution sprites were too small to make any kind of impression, and when blown up to desktop size they appeared flat, lifeless and, well, blocky!

I set about injecting some life into the pixels by painstakingly rebuilding the sprites and backgrounds in imitation Lego™ using the modelling application Ldraw (the results of which can be seen in the image at the top of this page. Due to the amount of time this process took, I decided that what was needed was a way of automatically extracting the colour and positional information from each pixel in the source sprite image. Once collected and stored, this information could be used to create an Ldraw file (replacing each pixel with an appropriately coloured and three-dimensionally positioned 1x1 Lego block). The application to do this was created in Visual Basic and tied-in nicely with Ldraw to produce results like the image shown below:

From this point onwards development moved away from using 'virtual Lego' and into remodelling the data extracted from the sprites using primitive objects (spheres, boxes, cones etc.). With each hour spent in development, the data extraction application became capable of producing more and more varied and complex results.

You can view some of my more recent artwork in The Gallery.

Richard Horsman - Rugby, Warwickshire, UK.