Robots on my desk!!

For DESMA 156B, the advanced 3D class, I decided to do a motion tracking experiment. I got a simple point and shoot camera and took some footage of my desk, using some tape to mark where i wanted to Rubrik's Cube to be. I then used Autodesk Maya 8.5's Maya Live tool to interpret the footage into 3D space, creating a 3D camera in my scene that would match the movement of my hand cam. After that it was simply a mater of modeling and animating some robots and putting them in the right place in the scene. Below is my first pass render of the animation!

I am The Laughing Man

This is a small sketch I thought I would post just for the fun of it. I am taking an artificial intelligence seminar this quarter and our discussion on augmented reality inspired me to try my hand at OpenCV. I have been having trouble getting the sketch to run efficiently, but I have seen some fantastic OpenCV programs done in Processing, so I know it's possible. Something for me to work on once I have the free time. In the meantime, here is my super awkward screen capture!

Louis C.K. Speech

I know I was planning on doing another couple of programming posts, but this quarter all my classes are animation and motion graphics and that has me pretty swamped. So instead I'm going to post one of my projects. This is a project from DESMA 155: Typography in Motion. The assignment was to find a speech by a famous person and edit footage of typography together to illustrate the speech. I chose a stand up comedy sketch by Louis C.K. talking about how frustrating it is to explain things to his two year old daughter. The resulting project is below!

And then there were bubbles!

I oftentimes find that most of my projects are very spontaneous. I think this is why I like Processing so much; I'll be doing whatever I'm doing and then suddenly be like "oh hey I want to program x!"

And then I do.

My latest spontaneous Processing shenanigans were inspired by my motion graphics professor Rafael Macho. He was showing us some of his work and a design from his Aptera Car project caught my eye.

I thought "Wow, a design like that would be incredibly tedious to illustrate, but probably really fun to program" so I pulled up Processing and got to work.

My First attempt was very simple: Create a simple set of rules for how the bubbles look and then for every vertical coordinate create one with a random x coordinate. It ended up looking something like this (or click here to try the applet for yourself):

I liked the result from a visual standpoint, especially since the pattern scrolls infinitely, but I decided I wanted to try and see if I could prevent the bubbles from overlapping. I wanted to try incorporating physics. I found some code in the Processing examples library called "Bouncy Bubbles," by Keith Peters. I tweaked the code to incorporate my aesthetic and ended up with this:

The new bubbles, while amusing to watch, didn't create a pattern I liked as much as the previous attempt. So I returned to my previous attempt and reprocessed it in a different way so that the texture generated statically, without scrolling down the screen. I then decided that since it was a texture, it was important for it to be tileable, so I added a couple checks to make sure the bubbles continued on the opposite side of the screen if they went over the edge. In the end, I was rather pleased with the result:

The difference is not very obvious from taking a snapshot of the program, however when running the program (which features PDF export in the application version) and using the texture, it is now seamless and can be duplicated infinitely in any direction.

Coming soon - "And then there was JavaScript!"

Album covers for The Pillows (fun fun fun ok!)

During my senior year of high school I took AP 2D design. I had been messing with digital graphics for many many years, but this was my first experience with real graphic design, although I did not realize it at the time as I was striving to do digital illustration. For the AP portfolio I was required to do a concentration: a series of 12 pieces that followed a theme. I decided I would do album covers for my favorite band - The Pillows.

I wanted to do this not only because they were my favorite band, but also because their song titles were just so bizarre and made fantastic titles for art pieces. I did covers for songs such as "Instant Music," "Waiting at the Bus Stop," "Robotman," and "Little Busters." It was incredibly fun and I learned a lot - I had never done anything quite like it.

Now I'm in my third year of design school and such things come so much more naturally to me. I just finished two quarters of visual communications with Henri Lucas and decided I would try to make a new album cover, one with more focus on typography. I decided to try the song "Fun Fun Fun OK!" because I felt like the music could inspire some fun typography. After designing the cover, I took a live-trace of the pillows logo and added it to the cover (the vector is a little sloppy, but almost unnoticeable at low resolution).

You can listen to the original song here.

Another text RPG part 2

So as I mentioned in my previous post, Another text RPG, I had really hoped to make my text RPG more than just a choose your own adventure website. Well for another project in the same class we had the assignment of creating a situational simulation that incorporated some kind of skill check. I created an RPG style battle system (yes there seems to be a pattern here). This is basically what I wanted to add to the previous project, aside from a more interesting GUI, but they ended up being separate. Maybe someday I will have the time to combine them, but for now they are what they are.

So here it is, Magical Gladiator! I hope you enjoy it :)

Another text RPG

Near the beginning of my Artificial Cultures class we had the assignment of making some sort of "branching simulation," basically another choose your own adventure project in JavaScript. I had done these before, it's a pretty common homework assignment for learning if-else statements, so I decided I would try to add a twist to this one. Unfortunately because I procrastinated and did the project the night before, the twist only went so far as adding a dice roll to certain events where your character selection affected your chance of success.

If I were to continue working on this assignment, which I most likely will not, I would try to be rid of the alert windows. Because they are easy to learn and quick to write, many of our simulations in this class utilized these prompt windows. I would be interested in creating a browser-based interface for something like this in later projects.

So here it is: An Adventurer's Quest