A Narbonic Coloring Book
Commentary: On
May 3, 2009 ~ 3 Comments
Yeah, so I ran out of activities and just did a bunch of black-and-white drawings. I did like doing these little-kid versions of the characters. This little version of Mell is, of course, not to be confused with Li’l Mell.
Yup, Victorian cast. Helen’s head is too small.
I don’t think this was an old drawing, so I don’t know why I gave Dave his old hair. Force of habit, probably.
Man, I forgot I did so many of these. Blame James Rice, who just kept coming up with activities.
This maze is super cute.
Via Photoshop’s magic wand and selection refinement tools, it’s actually pretty easy to solve most mazes in a matter of seconds. I’m a bit surprised at how simple the path in this one is.
Hey! Someone solved it, and did it automatically too! That’s good, because it was created with a program I wrote many, many, years ago in good old QBASIC. The Narbonic maze was the last time I ran the program, and that was a fairly simple maze. You should have seen some of my more elaborate ones.
The automatic-solution technique is pretty simple. Just magic-wand one of the walls, then expand the selection by the width of the path, then contract it by half the width of the path and then border it by a couple pixels. Voila, your selection contains the path.
In this case I had to do a little more to clean up the paths because of many corners lacking a pixel, though. Specifically I selected color range, then expanded the selection by one pixel, then floodfilled that onto a new layer. Also I had to do a little cleanup of other parts, but that was trivial.
One way to at least somewhat defeat this strategy is to make the paths varying in width. Also, more complex topologies than genus-1 can make things weird as well.