How to Create Your Own Rubik`s Cube Mosaic
Contents
1. Color Palette The Rubik s Cube has 6 colors White Yellow Blue Green Red and Orange We are going to convert our picture to only use these 6 colors Levels Click Colors then Levels to open the Levels dialog window Input Levels Input Levels in this window is actually one of the most valuable tools to use for any image manipulation In this window you can r fix a number of mistakes made when a picture was taken In the example to the right you are looking at a graphical representation SS A of shadows highlights and midtones The X axis is the scale from Fa 32 119 Z 230 black 0 to white 255 and the Y axis is the number of pixels at each particular level In the example we can see that there are a lot of pixels in this picture that are white or very nearly white due to the larger Y values at the far right of the graph There are 3 settings here that we are going to adjust Black level also called black point or shadows White level also called white point or highlights and Mid tone also called midpoint or gamma Black level takes the value you have selected and makes all pixels equal or below that value black If you slide from 0 all the way up towards 255 you will see the picture fade to black White level works the same all values above it become white As you move black and white levels closer to each other you are removing a lot of colors recall that our goal here is to eventuall2. It turns out that for a LOT of the pictures we have wanted to convert the green color on the Rubik s Cube doesn t blend as well White through red blend very well and red to blue typically does ok However blue to green often doesn t look very good Once you try this a few times it s easy to switch colors around quickly Switch to Indexed Click Image then Mode then Indexed to open the Indexed Color Conversion dialog window Click Generate optimum palette and enter 6 for maximum ncex olor Conversio 2S number of colors a Convert Image to Indexed Colors Dadivoso Andalusian Stallionjpg 5 Note the Dithering setting is None Dithering is when 2 colors sania are stitched together to give the illusion of another color or a gradient between the two Here s an example of how red and blue Maximum number of colors 6 a ALLS EE dithering can appear purple if the pixels are sufficiently small You Use black and white 1 bit palette can play around with different dithering settings to see if you like Use custom palette them Color dithering None x V Enable dithering of transparency Help Convert Cancel Convert Optimized Indexed to Rubik s Palette Click Windows then Dockable Dialogs then Colormap You can now see the 6 color palette that GIMP has selected based on the colors that were left after setting levels This
3. is another method of interpolation however GIMP doesn t allow you to have any say in the implementation as they do in other situations like we saw in scaling Right click on any color and select Edit color There are many different methods available to select the Rubik s Colors Here are some example HTML codes for them White Yellow Orange Red Blue Green ffffff ffffOO ff9c00 f60000 3737b3 00d900 To Green or Not to Green You can now play around with the colors and decide whether or not to use green If you don t want to just repeat the last step and choose only 5 colors If you are more advanced with image manipulation you might try leaving the green and manually substituting dithering with other colors in the areas defined as green Here are some examples we came up with The left image is AFTER indexing to 6 but obviously before converting to Rubik s Palette Which would you choose We decided none of these were contenders to actually become a mosaic but thought the 2 image from the left turned out OK Try Again As you do this more you will start to get much faster at this and you will start to know whether an image will come out before you get there One thing you must try with some image is to change up the order of manipulation Since so much of your final image comes from some mysterious math being done by the computer changing the order can dramatically alter the final product for bet
4. some video of the mosaic being made then use some editing software to speed up that video to make the building process time lapse 4 Make an event out of the building process a Find asponsor put some logo ad behind where the cubes will go The time lapse will be extra fun then A sponsor might also help you finance getting more cubes b Have lay people try to help solve cubes for the mosaic it s actually much easier than learning to solve a cube since it s only solving one layer
5. to refer to the GIMP user manual since this document is focusing on the lesser known features that are useful for Rubik s mosaics Instructions on what to do within the GIMP program are indented from the rest of the text Open your target picture in GIMP Go to File gt Open Select your image Cropping First make sure the image you ve selected is as small as possible In our example we started with a 1600 wide x 1200 tall picture but decided to focus just on the horse s head and cropped to 320 wide x 830 tall Your new pixel size can be put into the mosaic helper spreadsheet In the Toolbox e Select the Rectangle Select Too In the Image window e Select the portion of the picture you would like to crop down to e Click to open the Image Menu e Click Crop to Selection alusian Stallion jpg 1 0 RGB 1 layer 1600x1200 GIMP File Edit Select View Image Layer Colors Tools Filters Windows Help 4 Sre 2 Duplicate i ode ress Fl for more help Merge Visible Layers Flatten Image Align Visible Layers Guides EF Configure Grid Image Properties F Rounded corners E Expand from center F Fixed Aspect ratio Current in amp Position m soss Crop the image to the extents of the selection Resolution At this point you have a target image that is likely still much larger than the number of Rubik s pixels available This means you have to decrease the number of
6. you can still have fun and create nice mosaics it just might take a little time to get used to The You Can Do the Rubik s Cube Program will lend you sets of 36 100 or 225 cubes to create Mosaics for an 8 week period for FREE http www youcandothecube com cube mosaics Step 1 Let s cube some 2d math You could take all your Rubik s cubes and make a square and make your picture fit into that square but that s adding an unnecessary limitation on top of those we just talked about Doing a little bit of math we can come up with a list of possible mosaic dimensions the height and width Once we have a picture we can select the dimensions that most closely match Analyzing the mosaic How many cubes you will be working with will lead you to a number of choices for creating your mosaic The first thing we want to know is how many pixels we have to work with Example You have 225 cubes gt c 225 c cubes en pu pixels total 9c p 9 225 p so you have 2025 pixels gt 2025 p You can now look at the range of lengths and widths you have to choose from however you can t choose just any height and width that give a product equal to your total pixels Our example above had 2025 pixels 225 Rubik s Cubes You cannot make a mosaic that is 81 pixels wide by 25 pixels tall Remember that when actually building the mosaic you are placing 1 cube at a time which is 9 pixels at a time This also means the height and wid
7. How to Create Your Own Rubik s Cube Mosaic Using GIMP a Free Photo Editing Program Written by Corey Milner HighSchool Math Colorado Springs CO Materials e GIMP software download for free at http www gimp or e Rubik s Cubes borrow 100 or 225 Rubik s Cubes at no charge for 8 weeks For more details follow this link http www youcandothecube com cube mosaics Introduction As you can see in the picture above a mosaic can be made by using an array of Rubik s cubes Each sticker on one face of a cube acts as a pixel 9 pixels for each 3 x 3 Rubik s Cube and each cube gives you 6 colors in your palette to choose from There are many different ways a mosaic can be created and there are many variations that can arise when creating one This guide was created by a teacher and students that were new to this process for others that are new to the process so this not intended to be comprehensive but instead to give an introduction to mosaics and how to do avery basic conversion Good luck Challenges you may encounter gt Your picture has too many pixels A 15 Megapixel camera will give you a maximum picture resolution of 4752 x 3168 or over 15 million pixels Chances are you aren t going to have enough cubes to create your mosaic exactly like your picture gt Your picture has too many colors The Rubik s cube only has a 6 color palette so you will only have 6 colors to work with However even with these challenges
8. le Your picture is 1600x1200 gt h 1600 w 1200 hp Wp Pt wp width in pixels hp Wp Pt 1600 1200 p so the picture is 1 920 000 pixels gt 1 920 000 p This is why we came up with the total pixels number for the mosaic earlier You can now compare the pixels we need to what we actually have The picture has almost 1000 times more pixels than our mosaic Step 2 Smart image selection This step becomes much more important if the number of cubes available to you is smaller The general rule of thumb here is to find a picture that coincides with the 2 main challenges of a Rubik s Mosaic 1 the fewer the number of colors the better and 2 the fewer the number of total pixels the better It was through trial and error that we found image selection made the biggest difference in getting a good final result Your results may differ so play around The examples shown below will actually use a different image than that which we used to make our final mosaic to better highlight some of the difficulties that arise from selecting a more difficult starting image Step 3 Image manipulation will explain some tools that are available using an image manipulation program called GIMP GNU image manipulation program which anyone can download for free http www gimp or used version 2 6 11 If you use a different version you might need to search around for the same features If you have never done image manipulation you might need
9. pixels making up your picture Note that image processing programs will likely use the term resolution to mean pixels per inch and image size to mean total pixels The pixels per inch setting only matters when printing your digital photo which we won t be doing When using the term resolution we are referring to the total number of pixels Scale You now should have a list of possible height to width ratios and their pixels either on your own or using the provided spreadsheet The Rubik s height to width ratio that most closely matches the picture s ratio is now chosen and the corresponding pixels are now used to set the pictures height and width You are selecting only one number to use based on this logic If Picture height width ratio gt Rubik s Cube height width ratio then use Height Else use Width If you used the spreadsheet column H will tell you which Rubik s pixel number to use when setting this Target Picture Information in pixels Height Width total pixels number of cubes side length 15 pixels closest to square Width Height h w ratio scale choice 13 17 12 18 11 20 10 22 9 25 s v so since our picture ratio Is 6 a7 A 6 16 less than the Rubik s ratio a gt width of 27 will be put into 3 75 25 GIMP s scale window F 112 56 0000 1 225 3 675 225 0000 In GIMP select Image then Scale Image to get the
10. scale image dialog window Note the blue oval is highlighting a chain icon This icon represents whether or not the ratio of height to weight should be fixed The default is fixed If you click this the icon changes to a broken chain and this means that your final image will be more distorted The trade off here is distortion vs lost resolution and we have usually chosen decreased resolution but your results may vary The example will use a fixed ratio to minimize distortion Click the number in the Image Size field that corresponds with whichever dimension you have just determined to use our example is Width 27 Press the tab key to select another field and you should see the other dimension update to keep height to width as close to the original ratio as possible in this example our height is now 70 instead of 75 this shows how much resolution you have just lost Click Scale and your image is now very small In the bottom of the image window you can make the percentage larger to zoom in Your image is now the correct number of total pixels lie OS 2 27 ols Fites Windows H ti Scale Image a Scale Image J a lumited imponed 4 p db i s Image Size q Width 2 A oboi 3x OO O BAAGA Height 70 ne px z athe sholbuh ate Shs X resolution 72 000 oP a 2 3 Y resolution 72 000 3 ia pixels in v i pine all Interpolation Cubic a Rectangle Select Help Reset Scale Cancel Moce il i i
11. ter or worse If you decide to change up the order of manipulation crop really should always be first and if you do Indexed before levels just don t do levels at all Here s another example of order Crop this should always be first gt gt Levels gt gt Indexed gt gt Scale gt gt Convert Mosaic Time Building Instructions Now you need to add some gridlines to your image and decide on how many sections to break down into Typically it will make it easier for builders if the grid sizes are smaller It makes it more manageable to get built without errors Then make digital copies that can be zoomed by the builders or print out the grids We opted to print a couple big picture copies and then a zoom in of each grid Building Logistics You ve gone to all this effort to make an image then you re going to put forth a bunch more to actually build it Please make sure you ve thought about how people will see this before you get to that point Here s some thoughts ideas 1 Typically these will have more impact if people can view it from far away and up close 2 Think about making a stand for your mosaic In the example picture at the beginning of the document you can see some wood framing This was custom made for this project The entire assembly could be tipped up to about 10 degrees from vertical totally vertical could make them fall to be seen from farther away 3 Set up a camera on a tripod and take
12. th go up by 3 pixels at a time The height of 25 is not evenly divisible by 3 so we would not have enough cubes For now it will be simpler to keep our units for area as cubes instead of pixels Generate a list of mosaic dimensions A good starting point is to take the square root of the number of cubes available and then round down to get the largest square that can be made Our example of 200 cubes would give a result of v 200 14 This gives you a starting point of a square made of 14 x 14 Rubik s Cubes You can decrease one dimension incrementally just divide and round down Once you have this list you can then multiply to get the height and width in pixels V 225 15 15 cubes x 15 cubes 39 gt 45 pixels x 45 pixels 225 14 16 14 cubes x 16 cubes 39 gt 42 pixels x 48 pixels 225 13 17 13 cubes x 17 cubes x3 39 pixels x 51 pixels 200 12 18 12 cubes x 18 cubes x3 etc Another way to generate this list is using a spreadsheet Rubik Mosaic Helper is an Excel spreadsheet that was created to generate this list with the only input being the number of cubes The spreadsheet is completely unlocked to encourage users to look at the formulas used in the cells and look at the logic involved to see how these lists are created Analyzing a picture A picture s resolution is usually given in pixels as height x width We now want to see the resolution in total pixels to compare to our mosaic constraints h height in pixels Examp
13. y have only 6 colors The gamma or mid point setting changes from lighter more color to darker less color as you go left to right Changing all of these values would also be equivalent to changing contrast and brightness but within the levels screen you have much more control over the settings You should now spend a fair amount of time playing with these values and watching how they change the image The only rule to follow here is you must bring black level and white level much closer together but where they are on the chart will vary for different pictures For a lot of pictures this step will make the background simply disappear If instead your background is blending into the picture in a bad way you might need to selectively delete it Here is where we ended up on our example but there are many other choices for levels that also could have worked but just looked different Adjust Color Levels Background 10 Dadivoso Andalusian Stallion jpg Presets Channel Value x Reset Channel Input Levels ae R Z 33 Output Levels Auto A Edit these Settings as Curves V Preview Color Mode While the number of colors has been drastically reduced already we are now going to fix the number at 5 or 6 To do this we are going to use a color mode called indexed color This means we select the exact colors to use and GIMP will change each pixel to its nearest color in the palette 5 or 6
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