Stop-motion animation for you today!
(Also see the making of video)
Category Archives: Video
Typo
Typographic experiments. A new take on Garamond:
Some handcrafted stop-motion type:
from a roundup of Creative typography art.
I also dig Dave Bollinger’s letter-packing test, and a similar Processing sketch.
Randomness
I’ve recently unearthed my TI-85 calculator from school, evoking those hours in study hall writing TI-BASIC programs. Even then my favorite function was the random number generator, and I can recall one program that would create a monochrome, pixelated garden with vines creeping and spiraling, growing leaves and flowers. Unpredictable and different every time, that’s the important bit.
Enjoy this wonderful Long Now conversation with Brian Eno and Will Wright on generative music, visual design, psychology and games — I’ve mentioned before how seeing Eno’s 77 Million Paintings inspired my Rivers project in 2007. This is the first ten minutes:
Ambient
Experiments with screen-space ambient occlusion look good, especially viewing just the shadow layer. I’ve long wanted realtime ambient illumination and am enjoying the snowy, papery quality of these.
More snapshots on flickr.
Focus
I added a depth of field shader to Rivers, an effect I’ve wanted for a long time, since I really love how it looks in miniature / close-up photography. Here’s a test run with some blocks:
and applied to the usual scenery it lends a hazy atmosphere:
The technique records distance-to-camera values for each pixel (smuggle them in the alpha channel) and then interpolates between a sharp version of the scene and a blurred one as outlined in this nVidia paper and this post.
It’s a Lamp
Cities and Mathematics
Links on mathematically & artistically modeling cities! Mostly videos!
World Builder – a great short film with dreamy immersive interface ideas
The making of Telematics City. Also:
- MxR Architecture, a tangible augmented reality interface
- Pixel City, procedurally generated nighttime cityscape
- TED talk on fractal patterns in African villages
- NY Times on how cities are like organisms mathematically
Illuminated Cities
Projection mapping is a method of painting light onto 3D objects rather than a rectangular screen to give them more life and depth. Create Digital Motion has been covering a lot of recent work, collected under their projection mapping tag. The technique has been taking off like crazy this year thanks to software like the Video projection tools project and patches for vvvv. One of my favorite uses is in the gorgeous film SCINTILLATION created with stop-motion and projection mapping onto orchids.
Back to buildings. I’m digging these because it’s a different kind of augmented reality, one which doesn’t require looking through a video feed. I mentioned previously using decaying cities as canvas; here pictures and information can be superimposed onto large-scale scenery for any number of viewers, and the hardware is becoming increasingly accessible. I’ve seen several light graffiti projects. This performance uses giant arrays of LEDs sequenced and synced with music to turn museum windows into pixels for a light show:
This rendered animation superimposes volumes of digital color onto gray, concrete urban environments (and here’s another).
