Pixel sorting & Making original things
Like many people, I spend a good amount of time scouring the internet for people making cool stuff. They inspire me to build said cool thing. And maybe learn something along the way. However, I often feel something witholding me from even trying.
The cool thing I found online this time, was a video on sorting pixels in images by Acerola.
In it they talk about sorting the pixels in images by some value as an aesthetically pleasing graphics shader.
And while i'm in no way a graphics programmer, I was certain I could implement something that could achieve the same final effect.
Albeit not as a shader, for only a single image, and nowhere near real-time.
As I started thinking about the implementation the doubt started to creep up on me. Why build something if someone else has already done it? Now this might seem like a pretty harsh approach to a silly coding question. But I found that it heavily sways my motivation to take on these tasks. After ignoring this onsetting dread, I ended up actually really enjoying the making of the different mapping/sorting functions to create a pretty image.
The results speak for themselves. The background of this site is one of the images I generated after a couple tries.
A couple days after, I was thinking about a part of my implementation that used bitwise operations to pack two values into a single int32. And thought to myself: "Can't I do someting cool with bit shifting or these images?" This actually caught me by surprise. As I was still in the mindset of Recreating instead of Creating. However, this does make me see the benefit of just trying stuff that seems cool.
