Pixel Code

Writes the picture in code: zeros and ones, denser and lighter where the picture is bright. Scramble sets how random the characters are, Shadow and Highlight the colours of the code.

Group: Text & Glyph · How to add an effect

Pixel Code

Original

Use it for: a person turned into data · digital worlds, surveillance, a machine that sees · a picture that dissolves into code on a cue.

• Cell Size – how big the characters are.
• Scramble – how random the characters are.
• Black Level – clears the dark stage.
• Shadow and Highlight – the colours of the code.

Tip: keyframe Scramble from 0 up to 1: a picture you can read in its characters dissolves into a wall of code, and back. For a figure written in code on black, set Black Level to about 0.15 (Binary Portrait).

Pick one in the Preset row of the effect card. It sets all controls at once, in one undo step, and the row then shows its name until you change something. A control with keyframes keeps them, and the card says so.

Binary Portrait – bold zeros and ones in ice blue, turning pale where she is brightest, only where the picture is lit: Black Level 0.22 leaves the dark stage black. A person written in binary; for data, identity, a figure scanned by a machine.

Hex Dump – larger pale grey figures 0–9 and A–F over the whole frame, like the raw bytes of a file in a terminal. The picture shows in how bright and how dense they are. Calm and technical; good under text.

Heat Map – the digits 1 to 9 from deep violet to yellow, the brighter the part the higher its figure: a thermal camera in numbers. Scramble 0.25 keeps each figure close to the one of its brightness, so the warm figure reads at a glance.

Source Code – brackets, operators and signs of program code in pink, sparse dots in the shadows, dense brackets and # in the light. Weight 800 gives the thin signs enough light to carry the picture.

Style – switches to another look of the same engine and keeps your values and keyframes, for example ASCII, Matrix Rain or Number Field. Scramble, Shadow and Highlight belong to Pixel Code alone: other looks leave them unread, and switching back brings them back. Undo brings the old look back.

Cell Size – how big one cell, and the character in it, is. 6–10 gives a fine texture of code that reads as a picture from afar; 12–16 clearly readable zeros and ones (Binary Portrait, Hex Dump); 24 and more a few large characters for a projection. It counts pixels of a 1080p picture, so the preview, the thumbnails and a 4K export show the same characters. 4 to 72 px, default 10 px.

Amount – how much of the effect you see. At 0 the original picture, unchanged; in between, the code fades in over it. Keyframe it to let the picture dissolve into code. 0 to 1, default 1.

Background – how much of its colour fills each cell behind the character. At 0 the code stands on black; 0.2 lets the picture show faintly as flat squares between Shadow and Highlight; 0.3–0.5 fills the cells, so the figure glows behind its code (Heat Map); at 1 the characters vanish into a plain mosaic of the two colours. 0 to 1, default 0.2.

Black Level – the brightness up to which the picture counts as black. Everything darker gets the first character of the ramp, the space in Binary (with Invert Ramp the last one), in the Shadow colour, even at Scramble 1. So a grey stage drops out and only the lit figure is written in code. Try 0.1–0.2 on stage footage. 0 to 0.9, default 0.

Invert Ramp – swaps the ends of the ramp: dark parts get the dense characters, bright parts the sparse ones, so the code fills the shadows and thins out in the light. The colours stay. At Scramble 1 and Black Level 0 every cell draws any character anyway, so Invert Ramp only reshuffles them, and the card says so. Either on or off, default off.

Ramp – the characters the code is made of, from the darkest to the brightest part. Binary (a space, 0 and 1) writes the classic zeros and ones; Numeric the digits 1 to 9 after a space (Heat Map); Standard, Detailed, Blocks, Bars and Symbols turn it into code of signs, shading blocks or level bars. While a Custom Ramp is typed, the row rests and the card dims it. In the menu: Standard, Detailed, Blocks, Bars, Binary and 2 more, default Binary.

Custom Ramp – your own characters, from sparse to dense, instead of the Ramp: 0123456789ABCDEF writes hexadecimal (Hex Dump), .:;=+-*/<>(){}[]# the signs of program code (Source Code). Start it with a space, so dark cells can stay empty. Spaces at the end are ignored, and a ramp longer than 256 characters is thinned to 256 (the card says so). Clear it to use the Ramp again. Any text, default empty.

Font – the lettering. Monospace draws the even characters of a terminal or a program listing; Serif and Sans Serif look more like print or signs. Each is narrowed to fit its cell. Monospace, Serif, Sans Serif, default Monospace.

Weight – how heavy the strokes are. Heavier characters carry more colour, so the code gets brighter; thin signs such as those of Source Code need 700 or more to glow. How many steps you see depends on the font: the built-in monospace font of many systems only has regular (up to 500) and bold (600 and more). Keyframes step from one weight to the next. 200 to 900, default 600.

Scramble – how far each cell may stray from the character of its brightness. At 0 every cell takes that character, as in ASCII, and the picture reads in the characters. At 1 every cell draws any character of the ramp, and the picture shows only in the colour: a dense wall of code, the look of effects saved before Scramble existed. In between, each cell draws from a few neighbouring characters, so the lit figure is written densely and the dark parts sparsely. With Binary, Scramble changes in three steps: 0, up to 0.5 and above 0.5. Each cell keeps its draw, so the code stands still on a still picture. Outside the range it renders as 0 or 1, and the card says so. 0 to 1, default 0.5.

Shadow – the colour of the code, and of its ground, in the darkest parts. A deep, dark colour lets the stage recede, so the lit figure reads. Pick a colour, default #0c2f52.

Highlight – the colour in the brightest parts. In between, the colour runs evenly from Shadow to Highlight with the brightness: two colours of one family (navy to ice blue) stay calm, a dark violet to yellow reads like a thermal camera (Heat Map). Pick a colour, default #5cffc4.

Pixel Code works in six stages, one folder each in the Nodes tab: Cell Grid cuts the frame into square cells, Cell Sampling & Tone reads the brightness in the middle of each cell, Tone to Glyph picks the character of that brightness, Scramble lets each cell draw another character near it at random, Atlas Alpha looks up where that character covers the cell, and Ink & Appearance colours it from Shadow to Highlight. Click a folder’s header to open it. Scramble makes the code; the other folders work as in ASCII. Pixel Code is one look of the glyph engine that the Text & Glyph looks share; its Style menu switches between them.

Smallest Component – the shorter side of the frame; divided by 1080 it scales Cell Size, so a 4K export, a portrait frame and a thumbnail show the same code.

Maximum – the cell size in pixels of this frame, never smaller than 2.

Floor – which cell the pixel lies in, counted in columns and rows. Scramble draws its random number from it, so every cell keeps its own draw.

Fraction – where the pixel lies inside its cell, from 0 to 1; Atlas Alpha draws the character with it.

Divide – the middle of the cell, where the whole cell reads the picture.

Clamped Image Sample – reads the input picture at the cell centre, never outside the frame.

Split RGB + Alpha – the cell’s colour and its transparency. Pixel Code takes only the brightness of the colour; the transparency becomes that of the whole cell.

Luminance – the brightness of the cell colour, weighted the way the eye sees it (green counts most).

Divide – applies Black Level: the luminance minus Black Level (Subtract), divided by what is left above it (the other Subtract: One minus Black Level). The Clamp next to Black Level keeps it between 0 and Black Level Max 0.9.

Clamp – keeps the result between 0 and 1, so everything darker than Black Level becomes 0: the Tone. It picks the character and, in Ink & Appearance, the colour.

Subtract – one minus the tone, for Invert Ramp.

Switch – the tone as it is, or inverted when Invert Ramp is on.

Clamp – keeps the tone just under 1, so the brightest cells get the last character and never one past it.

Multiply – spreads the tone over the number of characters in the ramp.

Floor – drops the fraction: the number of the character of the cell’s brightness, the Tone Glyph that Scramble draws around.

Lit – Greater Than: is the cell’s Tone above 0, so brighter than Black Level? The other Greater Than asks whether Black Level is set at all (above 0). Scramble comes in through a Clamp that keeps it between 0 and 1.

Dark Scramble – a Switch: 0 while Black Level is above 0, otherwise Scramble. At Black Level 0 every cell draws, also the darkest.

Cell Scramble – the second Switch: Scramble for a lit cell, the Dark Scramble for a dark one. With Black Level set, a dark cell keeps its own character, the space, even at Scramble 1, so the dark stage stays empty.

Ceiling – the Cell Scramble times the ramp’s length minus one (Subtract, Multiply), rounded up: how many neighbours a cell may draw instead of its own character. Any Cell Scramble above 0 gives at least one.

Window – that plus One (Add): how many characters the cell draws from, its own one included. 1 at Scramble 0, the whole ramp at Scramble 1.

Floor – half the window (Multiply by Half), without the fraction: how far the window reaches below the cell’s own character.

Window Start – the Tone Glyph minus that half (Subtract), kept between Zero and the last place a whole window fits in the ramp (Clamp): the first character of the window. Near the ends of the ramp the window slides inwards instead of running out.

Random (Cell) – one random number from 0 to 1 for each cell, from its Cell Number: the same on every graphics card and in the export, and without the diagonal stripes the earlier random number drew across the frame.

Draw – the random number times the Window (Multiply), without the fraction (Floor): how many characters the cell moves on from its own one, 0 up to the window minus one.

Step – the cell’s own place in its window (Subtract: Tone Glyph minus Window Start) plus the Draw (Add).

Place in Window – the step wrapped back into the window: the Divide by Window (after adding Half, so the division never lands just below a whole number), Floor and Multiply give the whole windows in it, and the Subtract takes them off.

Glyph Index – Window Start plus the place in the window (Add): the character the cell draws, always inside the ramp. Atlas Alpha looks it up.

Floor – the row of the character on the atlas, a sheet of all characters of the ramp drawn in the chosen Font and Weight.

Subtract – its column on the sheet.

Clamp – keeps the place inside the cell half a pixel of the sheet away from the edges of the character’s square (Half Texel, 0.5 of the 64 pixels of a square, and One Minus Half Texel), so the smoothed read never mixes in the neighbouring character.

Sample Image – reads the sheet at the character’s square plus the place inside the cell.

Split Vector – the Glyph Coverage: 1 inside the strokes of the character, 0 around them. Ink & Appearance colours it.

Code Color – mixes Shadow and Highlight by the Tone: the one colour of the cell, for its character and its ground. Pure black takes Shadow, pure white Highlight.

Coverage – moves Background towards One by the Glyph Coverage (Mix): 1 inside the strokes of the character, Background around them.

Glyph Cell – Code Color times Coverage (Multiply): the character in the full colour of its cell, the ground in a share of it, black at Background 0.

Faded Color – fades the untouched picture, pixel by pixel, towards the glyph cell by Amount and divides by the faded alpha. Both are first multiplied by their transparency, so the colour a transparent pixel hides never shows as a fringe around a cut-out figure.

Remix: open Ink & Appearance and drag a cable from Glyph Coverage onto T of the Mix that gives Code Color, in place of the Tone: every character now shines in Highlight and its ground in Shadow, so the colour no longer follows the picture and only the density of the code draws the figure. Try it with Scramble 0.5 and Background 0.3.

• Size. Cell Size counts pixels of a frame whose shorter side is 1080: a 4K export, a portrait 1080 × 1920 frame, a lower Preview Quality and the thumbnails show the same code. A cell is never smaller than 2 pixels; below that Cell Size renders as 2, and the card says so.
• Scramble. Each cell draws one of 1 + ceil(Scramble × (ramp − 1)) characters around the one of its brightness, from Random (Cell) of the cell: the same in the preview, the export and on every graphics card. With Black Level above 0, cells at or below it keep their own character. Scramble renders between 0 and 1; outside that range the card says so. With the three characters of Binary, Scramble up to 0.5 lets dark parts draw a space or 0 and bright parts 0 or 1; above 0.5 any of the three can appear anywhere.
• Characters. The code comes from an atlas, a sheet the engine draws for the Ramp, Font and Weight and keeps. Its tallest character spans 88 % of the cell height. Weight is drawn in steps of 100.
• Time. Pixel Code does not move by itself: every cell keeps its draw, so on footage the code changes only where the brightness of the picture changes, and a paused picture needs no extra rendering.
• Transparency. Each cell, its character and its ground take the transparency of the cell’s centre, so a cut-out figure keeps its outline in whole cells. Amount fades the transparency back to the original’s, pixel by pixel, without a fringe.
• Saved projects. A Pixel Code that stores its node setup keeps its look, including the earlier random number, whose sine drew faint diagonal stripes across the code. Effects saved without a stored setup now draw from Random (Cell), without the stripes; this is a fix. They keep Scramble 1, so every cell still draws any character, and the earlier deep blue and mint (#144d7a and #47f2b8). Presets fully apply only to effects added in this version: a stored setup from before has no Background, Black Level, Scramble, Shadow or Highlight row, so a preset leaves those values out.
• More: Effect system · Node Catalog · Styles and presets.