TODAY, CREATE. » Color

Line Topography Update

Mike Creighton — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 22:04:57 +0000

I spent some time earlier in the week refining the drawing algorithm even further, focusing on color palette selection and line weight distribution. I think I’m getting closer to something the produces pretty consistent results.

My next step — or perhaps experiment — will be to create some color palettes based on actual color fields that I produce using real paint or some other image source. I want finer control and intention over the possible color palettes, and while toxiclib’s color utilities are pretty amazing, I’m finding that the ColorRange constraints produce less-than-desirable results most of the time (too much or too little saturation and brightness at undesirable moments).

Here’s a demo of the Processing app so you can see the renders in realtime:

And here is some more hi-res output from the app:

+ View hi-res.

Line Topography

Mike Creighton — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 22:20:06 +0000

+ View it large!

Here’s a continuation of the Line Sketching post I did last week. What you’re seeing here are larger, higher-resolution renders that use a further-tweaked drawing algorithm, concentrating more on form and color.

The key to these pieces is seeing them in their native resolution. There’s so much texture and pseudo-form that emerges from subtle shifts in a single line over time. Here’s an example:

Full View

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Detail View

I need to continue tweaking the drawing routine and color choices before I’ll be happy enough to take these to a printer. Also, I’m going to be sticking any additional interesting output from this thing into a Flickr set called “Line Topography”.

In the mean time, here are some interesting ones that came out of the last 50 renders I did yesterday:

+ View it large!

Line Sketching

Mike Creighton — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 23:15:57 +0000

So I’ve been feeling less than creative and less than productive for the past 45 days or so. Yesterday I realized I needed to make something even if it was crappy.

Examining some of the recent things I’ve been inspired by and even some of my older posts here, I drew upon the following line-heavy references as my starting point:

visp Output Sample 001 (from 2007)
“flow” from Merdan Agayev
“line drawing, unstable/uneven surfaces: carpet”
All the work of Jean-Pierre Hébert

I’m in love with line. I’m especially in love with really dense linework that yields faux-3D forms and false topographies.

So I jumped right into Processing with a simple idea:

Let the user pick a horizontal line of pixels from camera input.
Analyze those pixels, deriving an array of values based on pixel brightness.
Create a vector line whose peaks and troughs are based on this array of values.
Use a bunch of Math.random() and Perlin noise and magic to draw this line on the screen from top-to-bottom.

Four hours later, interesting stuff started coming out. I’m making heavy use of GSVideo for camera input and toxiclibs for Perlin noise and color.

My goals for the end of the week will be to finesse the color logic, have the “input” line morph through two or three forms throughout the process of the render, and do some post-processing in Photoshop to get the colors to unify even further. I want to make some large prints. I think I also want to do a couple hand-drawn renditions based on some of the digital output.

Here are some more Instagram’ed crops from the first wave of output:

The Mode7 “Dusk Drops” EP Album Art

Mike Creighton — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 21:28:43 +0000

+ View the piece on Flickr.

Finally we’ve arrived at the final image to be used for the album art of Mode7‘s upcoming EP “Dusk Drops” (see above). There were a lot of contenders, but in the end, this image satisfied a certain visual balance and the general feeling of ominousness that we were looking to convey.

For these final renders, 2850×2850 images were generated by Sunflow, using the special Thinlens camera which allowed me to simulate a shallow depth of field. Each image took about 12 hours to render on a quad-core Intel i5 Windows 7 box.

Further post-processing was done in Photoshop to simulate things that we’d see in traditional photography: vignetting, chromatic abberation, and a subtle level of visual noise. Some color tweaking and other manipulations were done as well just to make the images a bit richer.

For the CD label itself, we’re going to use the following image:

+ View the piece on Flickr.

And then there were a few more images that I decided to render and treat, just because they were compelling to me and I wanted to see what they’d look like if I took them through the entire process.

+ View the piece on Flickr.

I’ll be following this post up with a video demoing the Processing app that I created for generating these compositions once they EP has been officially released in a few days.

Vacancy

Mike Creighton — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 22:50:30 +0000

+ View the piece on Flickr.

This is acrylic. It’s in a Moleskine (hence the weird paper crumple). I haven’t actually tried painting with acrylics in I-don’t-know-how-many years. And it’s the only kind of painting that I have some level of comfort with. You can thank my Color Theory class at SCAD for that.

I’m going to take this study and do an actual canvas. It’s probably going to be pretty bad. Can’t wait.

Reducing 3,500 to 29

Mike Creighton — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 04:52:32 +0000

Back from the Eyeo Festival in Minneapolis, I’ve taken a stab at making my final set of selects from the numerous compositions I generated last week.

After the last post, I went in and tweaked a couple of parameter ranges and how the noisy terrain was rendered and generated another 3,500 compositions, which you can see here:

+ See it super large on Flickr.

After the computer churned these out, I spent a few hours looking through them and managed to cull the set down to an even 350. But as I mentioned before, the next step was to render these using Sunflow, which I did right before I left for Minneapolis. Rendering the 350 images at 1280×1280 with no anti-aliasing and a very low sample setting took about 29 or so hours on a quad-core Intel PC. I had it dumping the output into a Dropbox folder so I could check on the progress on my phone during my trip.

Tonight, I took the next step and chose a final set of 29 images that are contenders for the final render. In that render, the visual noise will fall away considerably, and I’ll be generating a 2850×2850 image suitable for a 300dpi CD cover print.

You can see the 29 images I picked in this Flickr set. As of right now, these are my five favorite renders:

+ View the piece on Flickr.

10,000 Choices

Mike Creighton — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 20:35:05 +0000

You know what computers are good at? Being creative.

That is, they’re amazing at working tirelessly and generating variations, given the proper constraints.

I’m in the process of creating some album art for a friend of mine, Mode7, for an upcoming EP release. I wanted to create something that was simultaneously intentional (i.e. I had ideas for an image) and generative (i.e. I’d let the computer make stuff up too). For the last couple weeks, I’ve been slowly building a Processing app that helps me generate compositions given a curated range of possible random values.

Last night, I asked my app to show me 10,000 variations on a theme. Here’s what it came up with:

+ See it hi-res on Flickr.

And here’s a zoom of a 6×6 grid from that output:

And here are some random selects that I never would have come up with on my own:

These images are rendered in an OpenGL context, so the lighting is basic and even throughout. But this is only the first step in the process of creating the final image. The Processing app is a tool for creating compositions and color schemes. In the end, my selects are saved out as Sunflow scene files and rendered in Sunflow with global illumination at a super-high resolution. Here are a couple test renders to give you an idea of the end possibilities:

There are a couple things I want to note about this whole process.

Symbiosis

What has happened in this process of creation is the emergence of a symbiotic relationship between me and the computer. I started with clear intention for the type of image I wanted to create. As I began programmatically building the structures of the elements I wanted to use in the composition, it wasn’t until I saw the way the computer rendered my forms that I would continue moving forward. These renders influenced my direction and provided a sort of course correction.

The same happens when I ask the computer to provide me with a series of choices. I become the curator and the computer becomes the creator. It seemingly influences me as much as I influence its output. This is especially true when you introduce Math.random() into the relationship. That singular function is the computer’s very powerful voice.

This whole process is like a dance or a dialogue. And I’m beginning to learn how powerful this can be in discovering possibilities for creative output that I wouldn’t have been able to achieve on my own.

Discovery

When I tell the computer to give me 10,000 choices, the process of reviewing those choices makes me feel like I’m a scientist or an archaeologist exploring unseen worlds or newly revealed information. I’m seeing something wholly new. A world that had the possibility of existing, but only up until last night, never actually existed. And here I get to discover that new world.

There’s something so utterly enchanting and delightful about this. Flipping through these images brings me closer to some level of innocence and awe that I simply don’t encounter very often in my life. And now I’m hooked.

A Stroke Renderer

Mike Creighton — Mon, 17 May 2010 03:52:35 +0000

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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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Flow Lives, but Now with No Glove

Mike Creighton — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 20:16:21 +0000

Last year, I started a pet project called “Flow“. The point of the project was to find some intersection with more traditional art-making techniques and my interests in the digital realm.

Well, that itch has resurfaced, and I realized I was making things way too complicated. This time, I’ve turned to using some open source tools for the data capture portion of the project. Components include:

It’s actually really simple to get set up. Here’s a little demo of how it all comes together.

Next steps include making a client to listen for the TUIO data generated by CCV. I’m probably going to opt for an AS3 AIR client, since it’ll be fastest for me to create. Then create a web application that captures and stores this data. This I’ll build in CodeIgniter, again, since it’ll be fastest for me to create in this environment.

I’ve got a lot of stuff on my plate this month, and I want to participate in this month’s NaNoDrawMo on top of it. So, we’ll see where things net out.

No, srsly.

Mike Creighton — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 05:26:47 +0000

+ Get the wallpaper on Flickr.

No, guys, seriously. This is pretty bad. So bad, I don’t even want your comments. But I really needed to do something that was not programming.

I think once a week, I might try to make an iPhone wallpaper. Here’s the first. Looks like crap on your iPhone. No, seriously. Download it and then delete it.

The font is MOD™ from Fontfabric™. It’s free. You should snag it.