Tonight, I decided to take another step in the short evolution of Robert’s fun dice-table images. Mario Klingemann raised the bar with his Aviary filter that transforms images into dice-images. In addition to all that awesomeness, you can now play with a real-time dice mirror in your web browser. Enjoy.
Troubleshooting:
Flash is pretty weird when it comes to accessing your webcam. Even after you click “Allow,” your webcam might not turn on. Open the settings panel (right click -> Settings…), then click on the little orb/webcam icon, then select your real webcam from the dropdown. For some reason the iSight on my mac shows up as three different cameras, but it’s actually only accessible as the “USB Video Class Video.”
I often project emotions onto inanimate forms, aspirations onto moving objects. What is the natural home for an interestingly spun wood shaving? Where are those blobs of goo headed, and what do they think of each other? Tonight, I’ve done it with a quick code sketch. The behaviors are purely overlaid on top of the still images after they’ve been taken. Some dots are rejected by others, sometimes they’re bustling to work, or a connection is made across the room. These are simple stories for simple images, and I don’t pretend that they are clearly evinced without narrator intervention.
I just finished a short experimental animation. Independent objects move through space. Connections are formed between neighboring objects, creating an overall structure that grows, mutates and ultimately collapses.
So I’m just putting in my final days at Domani Studios now. I had the pleasure of working on a lot of fun projects with some really cool people here. Figured it was appropriate to rick roll them for my sending off. Of course with a particle system, though. Of course.
I began playing around with hydra a bit today (and I’m only six months behind…). It’s really straightforward to program in, but thinking about the resulting image one pixel at a time took a little getting used to. The environment that Adobe provides for developing shaders is fantastic. It automatically creates control sliders when you declare parameters, so you can tweak the resulting images on the fly. I’m looking forward to seeing how this shading language is implemented in future versions of the creative suite so I can play with it further. For now, I have a simple displacement function that operates both linearly and radially, and allows you to ‘fade’ out the edges a bit.
For examples by someone with a lot more control over shaders, see Quasimondo.
For source code and more, check out the Hydra Gallery (I added mine at the bottom).
More photos on flickr.
