Tutorial for Combos

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Tutorial for Combos

Combos are stacked bricks. The most common combination is a round 4073 brick on top of the square 3024 flat 1-stud brick.

The colour combinations you can make this way are almost endlessly. Some examples are shown below. On the left you see the original combo combinations, on the right you see the blended colours as are used in the application. These blended colours are used for a normal mosaic engine. In case of the Mosaic Pro engine the real colour distribution of the library picture is used (so: left in the picture below). This is generally more accurate. Now you are not stuck to the standard colour palette of brick any more...

There is a downside however. The colour distribution is not equal over the brick, not blending very well in colour. The centre colour is always dominant, while the edges are different. For large colour differences of the top and bottom bricks the effect can be too prominent. Slight differences between top and bottom brick are the best, like the ones that are marked with the white dot (picture above).

A second word of caution is to avoid huge amounts of combinations. The reason is that the application may select many colours, leading to a huge effort to create these colour combinations, where just a few are required in the mosaic. It's better to limit yourself to a limited amount of good blending combos, and the ones you also have plenty of in stock. To make a mosaic with more than 100 different combinations is quite a task, and may not always lead to the expected result.

Lesson 1: Make your database of Combos

This is by far the most cumbersome part of the tutorial. To make the database you first need to inventorise which combinations and colours of the combo bricks you have available (here we assume you will use the 3024 and 4073 bricks), then you need to choose which colour combinations are looking good, and blend very well. The best blend is usually achieved with transparent 4073 bricks. Some combinations of non-transparent combinations will also work. Combinations with a transparent 3024 may be possible but are not recommended to avoid that the base plate colour will bleed into the colour impression.

There is one important first rule that must be followed to make the database work: the file naming. The make sure the data of each combined brick is correctly derived from the Bricklink database you must follow this rule of file naming:

You should now specify the words between the < > characters but without these < > characters. Please make sure you add the + and the _ characters. These are required in the application to search the colour name string and colour # to connect to the Bricklink data. The brick data is derived from the Bricklink database, not from the colour of the picture. The colour of the picture is of course used to construct the mosaic. We strongly recommend to save each picture in the uncompressed .bmp format to keep the quality as high as possible.

Examples: Dark Blue+Trans-Yellow_63+19_JDFCombo.bmp and Trans-Yellow+Trans-Orange_19+98_JDFCombo.bmp

and where 'Trans-Yellow' has the Colour ID of 19 in the Bricklink database (entry #86, don't confuse these numbers).

A second rule is: the picture must be 60 x 60 pixels in size. The reason is that the application uses this 60 pixel value to determine how many studs are in the picture. For instance if you would add a 60x120 pixels picture is assumes that this is a 2x1 stud brick. In case of combos the limitation is that only 1x1 studs can be used here. Hence the rule of 60x60 pixels in size.

With help of Jeremy, user and inspiration for developing the Brickaizer application, we have selected a database of 290 different colour combinations. Still too many to make use of, but we can keep the amount to a maximum. The picture below shows all the pictures (!), although quite small.

When this selection is made, then create a picture library. Press the 'Picture library' button and follow the instructions. In case you want to know the details: here you can find more information on how to create a picture library.

Lesson 2: Make your first Combo mosaic

This is by far the simplest part of the tutorial. Basically press the 'Create mosaic' button. But before doing so we selected a good picture that works well with Combos. The picture should really be colourful, and with many subtle colours and preferably a wide colour range. As can be seen from the above colour library, we have plenty of reds, yellow, greens and blues, but just a few browns and greys. So, we have selected a source picture that requires these colours.

The settings are important. We have chosen to apply the mosaic engine of Mosaizer Pro, and use the actual pictures to rebuild the mosaic. We also choose the colour dithering to improve the overall colour impression. These settings are shown below.

The results are quite good. The real added value of combos is shown here: many small patches of a variety of (bright) colours, not so much (large) areas of the same colour. That kind of mosaics would be better to make with normal bricks.

When we enlarge a part of the mosaic, you can clearly see how the combination of base and top brick works: the greens are very subtly created, from bright green (almost lime) to yellowish green, and bluish green.

To show how the result would be achieved with the default Bricklink database (picture below): not bad but definitely not sparkling.

Lesson 3: Create a building blueprint for your Combo

The combo has two layers, each has its own building blueprint. To output this data you should either check the option 'Save output as excel' in the 'Preferences' pop-up window (automatic save), or use the manual 'Save mosaic as...' option in the main menu ('File' ). This will create the blueprint spreadsheet (as a normal mosaic), but now having two tabs, one for each layer. When the (default) output is opened (e.g. via the menu 'Results' > 'Open saved Spreadsheet') you will now only find the data of the two layers, and not see the combined result. To see the final result you need to open the blueprint bitmap, which is saved along with the spreadsheet. The two spreadsheets look like the picture below: left the lower layer, right the top layer.

The colours in the above shown spreadsheet are usually not the exact colours of the individual bricks. This is a simple limitation of using spreadsheets with representative, but averaged, RGB colour values, and real pictures that are more natural in colour impression. Nevertheless, the two spreadsheets are useful to build your combo-mosaic.

Alternatively you can also create building output as a .pdf file. First select via the menu 'File' > 'Print special' and select the size of the output (usually 32x32 stud base plates). In this case we have 4x4 base plates of 32 studs, one for the top and one for the bottom layer. The output then looks as follows:

Here you see similar output as the excel version: left the square bottom brick layer, right the same area for the round top bricks. At the bottom of each .pdf page you also find the amount of bricks you need for that part of the mosaic. Very practical if you want to build this mosaic with a team of people.

Epilogue: What else is there to do?

Basically you can play around with every setting that you can do with any normal mosaic, with or without real pictures.