TODAY, CREATE.
At FITC SF, I was asked to post links to some of the places around the web where I find inspiration. Here are ten places I visit on an almost-daily basis — most of them focused on delivering a compelling image.
- but does it float
- BOOOOOOOM!
- Buamai
- FFFFOUND!
- DETHJUNKIE*
- FIELD’s blog and projects
- CreativeApplications.Net
- Fashion Served
- today and tomorrow
- My Vimeo Subscriptions Feed
Probably nothing very surprising in that list, but it keeps things fresh for my eyes.
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Firstly, thanks to Shawn Pucknell and the whole gang at FITC for giving me the opportunity to speak at the first FITC in San Francisco. Thanks also goes out to everyone who attended my presentation. I really appreciate the feedback I’ve been given, and it was a pleasure meeting everyone who came up to shake my hand.
I want you guys to watch this space for a few things that were requested by some attendees:
- A Quicktime / PDF of my presentation
- A list of feeds I find inspirational
You can contact me at if you have any questions or any comments about the presentation or my work — or you can just leave a comment on this post.
For all the components related to Flow, you can find them at http://capturingflow.com.
Thanks again, everyone.
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After a day of revising the Flow Receiver application (almost a complete rewrite and a whole new UI) in preparation for FITC SF in August, I spent some time at Rontoms being anti-social.
Referenced this photo by Patric Shaw.
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Spent some time at Aalto Lounge last night, winding down from an 11-hour programming session. It’s so dark in that place, I honestly didn’t have any idea what these sketches even looked like until this morning.
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Vertex Normals Revisited
Posted on: July 5th, 2010
And tonight, got those vertex normals calculated. Much easier this time around — probably just because I understand it all conceptually now.
I’m really enjoying how this stuff is looking. Finally, I feel like this digital generative work feels as organic and alive as the source of the data itself. I can’t wait to add the UI controls for “sculpting” the composition and colors… and can’t wait to add more structural elements.
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Making Tubes
Posted on: July 4th, 2010
Now that I’m unpacked and settled in my new apartment — and since I have a 50 minute presentation coming up at FITC in just over a month — it was time to gain some momentum and get back on top of this stuff for Flow.
I’ll be the first to say that these definitely bear a strong resemblance to Evan Roth‘s latest Graffiti Analysis video called “Graffiti Analysis: 3D” — because they do. And because I was definitely inspired by it (just like I was inspired by the original project when I first saw it back in 2005 at FITC).
But this is just one layer of what I’ve finally settled on for my first real “pieces” to come out of this Flow project. I’m focusing on isolation of a few strokes, creating a strong composition, and building something structural — almost architectural — out of these energetic moments of frozen time.
The hurdle today was learning to draw a tube in space…this took the better part of the day. I would’ve used the GLE Tubing and Extrusion library, but unfortunately, that has dependencies on GLUT, which Cinder does not use. And I didn’t think that I’d be able to vary the thickness of the tube over its length, so I decided to try it from scratch. And we’ve got [decent] success. I do want to implement proper per-vertex normals to smooth the sucker out some more. I think I’ll be able to rip the per-vertex normals code from the old Noise Tube experiments, since it’s ultimately the same mesh structure.
And yeah, this is all OpenGL still. Once I get the other structural elements in place, I’ll be writing some sort of Cinder Block for creating a Sunflow scene / scene file and rendering this stuff out in Sunflow. The final aim is to create some prints from this thing. I’m giving myself till the end of the week to wrap up this visual direction, so I can focus on refactoring and documenting all the behind-the-scenes Flow applications for open source release around mid-August.
You can see the full set of this first bunch of renders in this Flickr set.
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+ Visit the FITC San Francisco Event Page
I’m both humbled and delighted to announce that I’ll be speaking at this year’s first ever FITC San Francisco event: FITC San Francisco 2010! The event runs from August 17th – 19th at the Mission Bay Conference Center at UCSF. FITC has gathered over 70 internationally renowned presenters from around the globe for this epic three day Flash, Design & Technology event.
I attended FITC in Toronto in 2005 and 2006, where I saw some of the most inspiring presentations, met some amazing people, and generally had an incredible time. This year I’m particularly excited to see presentations from the likes of Robert Hodgin, Yugo Nakamura, Ben Fry, Erik Natzke, Mario Klingemann, and Theo Watson.
My presentation is titled “Harnessing the Abundance“. For those of you that have been following along here, I’ll be telling the story of and process involved in my Flow project. I hope to demonstrate that you don’t need to know all these different technologies in order to start using them — that in today’s world, a lot of the hard work has already been done. You just have to generate an idea and put the pieces together.
Along with the presentation, I’ll be posting all the source code that’s gone into this project in an effort to “give back” — because I couldn’t have done any of it without the numerous open source projects I’ve built upon.
I’m scheduled to speak on Wednesday, August 18th at 10AM — the first presentation of the day. My presentation is listed as being technical, but I hope that it also possesses a fair amount of creativity.
Early Bird pricing ends on July 2nd, so you should definitely hurry and grab your tickets if you haven’t already. Also, if you use the code “mikecreighton“, you’ll get 10% off your ticket price! GO GO GO GO!
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+ View large on FindingContraints.com
I feel like there have been some omissions here as of late. While I haven’t been drawing as much I as could, I have been doing some sketching. Work has sort of ground things to a near halt.
Two months ago, Nate and I decided to make an official project out of our “Constraints” collaboration we started way back in 2007. We’re calling it:
We tried posting it all to Flickr at first. But I wanted to get away from that community and just make it something for us.
We’re at the end of our second month, and it’s been an admittedly crazy busy couple of weeks, so we both got behind. Out of sheer exhaustion from being at the computer tonight, I turned back to my sketchbook to round out my seventh drawing for the month (above).
That one and the one below are my favorites from the month. I like what I’ve omitted in each of them… and the tension between the fruit. I guess it’s just nice not to draw everything I see all the time… creates a more compelling image sometimes.
Cheers to the omissions.
+ View large on FindingContraints.com
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Spent a little time today on another tangent. One thing I didn’t like about those faux-cityscape renders was the fact that you completely lost all sense of the originating data. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but part of the reason I developed this whole system was to bring forth the energy and motion that actually went into creating the “seed” drawing.
So I took a step back and created a new renderer that let me isolate the individual “strokes” that were captured during the drawing session. In these renders, I’ve isolated three strokes; each has a unique color. The peaks in the height are derived from the relative velocity of a stroke at a given snapshot in time.
In Cinder, I created a GL scene that has a positionable camera and lets me page through each stroke. Then I can tap a key and dump out that stroke’s Sunflow scene data to the console. Along the way, I learned how to use the TriMesh class in Cinder. It made dumping the Sunflow scene data easier, since it really parallels Sunflow’s “generic-mesh” type.
The render at the top uses three sphere lights, a basic diffuse shader for each object, and Sunflow’s path-tracing global illumination system. The render below uses the Sunflow sunsky light, a foggy Phong shader on the three strokes, and the “fake” global illumination setting in order to get some vague ambient light. I started discovering that there are a lot of possible combinations for lighting in Sunflow — almost an overwhelming number.
Next I’m gonna try a different drawing technique for rendering these strokes.
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