Emerald Hill Vapour

Something something placeholder text, I need something to make sure that the summary generator is working right. blah blah blah here are some more words, I’ll put something more relevant here at some point.

After completing this wallpaper I wanted to remix it into something with a sort of vaporwave aesthetic. At the time I had actually been listening to a lot of future funk from a Soundcloud user NEXT ACCESS. I was inspired by the colours on this cover of a mix they did:

Since Emerald hill is (sort of) a beach, I decide to make a somewhat similar looking scene.

When looking at the clouds and the island, I had always thought that they looked kinda fake. When taken out of the context of the game and put in this high definition scene, it looked much more paper-like and flat when juxtaposed with the sun and the reflections. Going off of this, I decided that the sky should look like some kind of simulated graphic like a screen. Going along with this, I also decided that the water should be replaced with a grid and the sun should be one of those scrolling suns that you see in every single vaporwave landscape image (I think it’s required by law).

To start with, I created a gradient for the sky. I’m not entirely sure what I did to make this gradient because it isn’t a simple linear shape, I suspect that I may have used several different gradients and layered them on top of eachother, taking care to make the edges seamless so that it could be looped. The main things to note are that the bottom half of the sky is divided with a darker shade where the grid meets with the clouds/island. The effect used to make the scanlines are a built in effect in gimp called ‘video degradation’ which simply overlays RGB pixels in a pattern and blends them however you want. The sun, islands and clouds also have this applied to them. The grid has it applied but it isn’t visible in the same way as I’ll explain.

The clouds/island has the pixels shifted slightly using the ripple effect. I don’t remember the exact amplitude (it was probably around 8 or 9) but the period was 2, the angle 90, Resampling Linear and Wave type sawtooth. The period and wave type are important here as they are what causes the 1 pixel wide shift, the period can be set to whatever is preferred but the angle must be cardinally aligned (90 or 270 for a horizontal shift, 0 or 180 for a vertical shift).

It took me a while to figure out what the other effect I used was but eventually I found that it was the deinterlacing effect of all things. Combined with the last effect, it makes this pretty cool ghosting effect that can be modulated with the block size.

All of the foreground elements have the ‘Ripple’ applied to them, the closer ones have a stronger ripple than the further ones. The third crass layer from the bottom has a much stronger ripple, as well as the ‘noise’ and ‘glow’ effect to make it seem as if it’s corrupted (which I have to say is surprisingly effective despite how simple it is). The top layer of hills also has a slight glow around the edge to help give some contrast.

To make the sun, I simply made a circle and erased some of the lower lines, I then duplicated it but with different lines erased to give the scrolling effect. Finally I added a gradient and blended it with each of the layers, as well as applying the same video degradation effect as the sky. This was actually one of my first times creating a graphic out of simple geometric shapes and made me realize the true potential of using of using GIMP to create graphics from scratch. It sounds pretty dumb to say but at the time I thought that I just sucked at creating original graphics because I couldn’t draw, in reality though I was just looking at it wrong and I should have been focusing on using my understanding of digital graphics and manipulation software to create artwork.

In WE, I used the ‘god rays’ effect.

Finally to make the grid, I started in GIMP with a small square (probably about 25x25) and drew a 1 pixel wide box around the edge in a light blue colour, then I added a drop shadow and made it purple. I then upscaled it to 104x104 pixels (though I can’t remember why I chose this exact amount) using some kind of interpolation (probably either Linear or Cubic), added the same video degradation effect and tiled the grid as many times as I wanted. When I added it to WE, I gave it the same ripple effect as the grass. Then I used the perspective effect to make it seem aligned with the ground, note that I added the scroll effect above the perspective effect so that it would scroll the grid before the perspective was applied.

Overall I’m quite happy with how this wallpaper turned out (graphically), I like the way the colours turned out and I think it’s a good first attempt, though there are some minor issues with it. For one, if you view this at a lower resolution, the scanlines don’t appear as they should creating gaps in the lines. The island/clouds also suffer from this which can make them look a little strange.

And of course, just as before, there is the performance issue only this time it’s even worse. With nothing else running, this wallpaper utilizes up to 60% of my GTX 1070, unsurprising given that every layer has some kind of effect added to it over the last wallpaper. It’s becoming quite apparent to me that I wasn’t so concerned with performance back then, I mostly just wanted to see it working. My newer wallpapers, such as my Green Hill Zone remake takes up a more reasonable 15% of my GPU and even then I think it could be a little lower.