3d pixel scenes.

experiment 0 by moiz: a pixel castle at twilight, and a halloween shot.

the picture

a pixel castle on a hill at twilight: lit windows, a red flag on the tallest tower, pine trees, a path winding up from the bottom left, the sea on the right and a full moon.
320 by 200, enlarged by whole pixels. point at it to read one.

how it’s made

modelled in blender, then rebuilt in godot 4.7. the 3d scene renders into a tiny fixed viewport, here
320 by 200
(the size of a 1990s vga game screen)
, and that is enlarged by a whole number with
nearest-neighbour
(each new pixel copies the nearest old one, so edges stay hard instead of blurring)
scaling, so every pixel stays square. the light is one evening sun and stepped, painted shading: blue and lavender shadows, warm windows, a little haze with distance. no outlines, no crt filter, no dithering.
this page does the same to your screen: it picks the largest whole number of your screen’s pixels per picture pixel that fits the column of text, and checks again if you zoom or move the window to another screen.

play it

for now it runs in the godot editor, with an orbit camera and four pixel sizes, from 320 wide to full resolution. the web build goes here:

hollow lane

a halloween shot, twelve seconds long: three kids walk up a lane at dusk, past a scarecrow. made in blender by an ai agent, with a
ps1 look
(the way the first playstation drew 3d: corners snapped to whole pixels so shapes wobble, colours dithered into a fine pattern, fog over the distance)
, rendered at 320 by 180 and enlarged by whole pixels like the castle.

elsewhere

back to moiz, or the other experiments:
  1. council of claude
  2. learning using llms