individual11’s thought spew

Recently, I have been randomly collecting links for remixes of this song. Here are a couple of my favorites:

Been playing around with rendering out different chaos algorithms, and
the Lorenz Attractor is one of my favorites. So I built a few
different versions of the formula in processing, then took the renders
from there into PhotoShop and tried to create a couple cool posters.
Happy with most of them. Really like the idea of combining math and
some simple design around it, because it would be a pain to create the
posters completely in processing, and impossible to create the
graphics in PS.

           

Click here to download:

Lorenz_Attractor_posters.zip (5609 KB)

Had some time to mess with processing again, and built out a simple
organic motion test with these little worm creatures. Still needs some
work, but think for an initial test, it looks pretty cool.

Creature test from david vogeleer on Vimeo.

Jumped back into the grass algorithm where I convert a line of copy over to a bunch of random blades of grass in 2d. This time I messed around a bit in 3D as well as used a twitter search for the word "grass" as a data source for the different blades. Really like how they came out from the different angles. Will probably do an animation render later this week if I get some time to setup the camera motion.

Speaking of, working with the camera object is interesting. It has 9 different parameters to mess with, and I didn't quite understand each of the descriptions, so ended up building a sketch with a 3D box in the center and 9 different scrollbars controlling the different parameters so I can see what each did, and help me setup the camera for the grass renderings. Will try to post that sketch in a few days after some tweeks and posterous support help trying to figure out how to get a processing sketch live.

Anyway, here are 5 grabs and I will post some more on my flickr page later this week.

         

Click here to download:

Revisiting_grass_code_in_3D.zip (7297 KB)

So I changed up the code that converts text to grass blades and made it animate. Each frame takes about 20 seconds to render, then I stitched them together in after effects and uploaded the mov to vimeo. The quality kind of sucks, so in the future I will remember to render them out at higher resolution, but you get the gist.

The next step is going to be changing the bend algorithm to look a little more natural, and adding wind so the blades react synchronously.

Grass test from david vogeleer on Vimeo.

Wrote something quick for converting pieces of copy into blades of grass. Still a work in progress (like everything else), but I think the first draft came out ok. Couple screen grabs below, and am working on adding some more animation to it, but more on that later. The copy I used was "These are tall blades of grass", but it will work with any copy.

       

Click here to download:

Grass_in_processing.zip (1812 KB)

Ok, so I come from ActionScript, and although it's not the most powerful language for visualizations, it has some simplicities that I have taken for granted. For instance, rotating a MovieClip in Flash is super simple.. you set the center point correctly, then call rotation = Number. In processing however, it's a whole different beast. 1 - You have to translate degrees into radians, but you can do that with the radian function. 2 - the center point, by default, is the top left corner, so when you call rotate(), it basically rotates the entire canvas at runtime. There is a fix, but you have to be able to do a little math. You have to find the center point of your object, do an x,y translate, do the rotation, then translate back to normal. You have to translate back to normal after the rotation in order to continue drawing on the normal coordinate system. And when doing the translation back to normal, you can't just pass it the coordinates you want it to go to, you have to pass it the amount to move by (usally the inverse of the original translation). Here is a basic example that will rotate a rec in the center of the screen.


int rot;
int recSize;
int cX;
int cY;

void setup(){
 size(400, 400);
 smooth();
 noStroke();
 background(255);
 
 cX = width/2;
 cY = height/2;
 
 rot = 0;
 recSize = 80;
}

void draw(){
 background(255);
 fill(30);
 translate(cX, cY);
 rotate(radians(rot));
 translate(-cX,-cY);
 rect(cX - recSize/2, cY - recSize/2, recSize, recSize);
 rot++;
}

Found this cool site http://www.wordle.net/ that can take straight copy, or RSS feeds and create a word cloud. Works pretty well, below is what it did with this blog.

Continuing my experiments with processing, I decided to see if I could make anything interesting with just the frameCount as a data source (keeps track of how many frames have been rendered). So the top one is the proof of concept, the second one I made some minor adjustments to alignment and reversed the coloring. The final one (bottom one), I changed the color again, and added some bezier curves for the connections, and was able to render out multiple images per frame within the for loop.

If anybody want's the source, let me know in the comments.

counter 1 from david vogeleer on Vimeo.

counter 2 from david vogeleer on Vimeo.

counter 3 from david vogeleer on Vimeo.

So here are a couple example of the particle system I wrote in Flash ported over to Processing. I just had them run for about 450 frames at 30 frames a second, and then brought the pngs I exported into After Effects and exported a video.

I setup different types of trails for each one. If you want the code for any of them, let me know and I can post it as a zip.

particles 1 from david vogeleer on Vimeo.

Particles 3 from david vogeleer on Vimeo.

Particles 2 from david vogeleer on Vimeo.