Mosaic of Subcultures

It's really too late to worry about a review, but after weeks grappling on and off with Adobe Photoshop CS4 Extended for 3D painting, I finally got rid of the brush lag. The secret? Just disable OpenGL drawing.

For reference, here are my comp specs:
Dell XPS 1530 (laptop)
Intel Core 2 DUO T9300
4 GB ram
Vista 32bit

Devices:
Microsoft Mouse
XBox Wireless Controller USB
Wacom Bamboo Tablet

Good luck if you're still having issues. It's too bad, I really expect more from Adobe.

I'm getting comfortable with Gimp as my new concept art tool. Behold, potentially my first project on XNA, Samurai Fruit Picker!

A quick search led me to a discussion on watercolor filters. The original poster put up something that I thought was pretty impressive, but replies argued otherwise.

One poster in particular pointed the group to a Kurahawa Filter as a potential replacement algorithm. Apparently it is a non-linear class of image filters if you read through his links. Interesting stuffs.

Here is a processing applet that approximates a Kurahawa 5x5 Filter.

The world apparently revolves around Ken Perlin. Animating Perlin Noise shows how his noise function moves slowly through a 2-dimensional space varying hue.

Motion, textures, terrain, it's really pretty mind boggling what can be generated with it.

Much to the disappointment of my girlfriend for staying up so late, comments are now enabled on all blog posts. If you can brave a little re-captcha, you'll be fine.

Other upcoming fixes will include pagination and whatnot, but that's blah blah right? :) I'm just rushing through to get back to the cool stuff.

Big props to Jan Hammer for his mad 80's grooves late into the night.

Seurat Port part II is much closer towards a port of Paul Reiner's Seurat application as featured in his article, Pointillism meets Pixelation. For my version, I'm using a color complement function instead of a pink-of-death function.

After comparing the states of each as they progress, I'm sure I still don't quite have state progression moving forward correctly in time. Instead of moving in one direction, it seems to me they should be progressing outwards. I hope to give this sketch one more try in order to get it working damnit! I might actually have to download his source ;)

Seurat Port was a brief attempt to port Paul Reiners Cellular Automata animation technique to Processing written up in his article, Pointillism meets Pixelation.

What really happened, was that I was kind of nauseated by his choice of colors for the animation. This lead to me reading about color spaces and the color theory in general which just kind of left me winded and at a point that I wanted to close out the sketch. Other than that it's a pretty cool article if a little thin in explanation at times.

I still want to understand the application better; it's not quite clear to me how to technically execute the next step in a cells rule based on it's universe and neighborhood.

In the end I learned something about some stuff, so I figured it would be a good place to break the sketch off, and come back with a second part later. A true port of the code represents important objectives for myself in Processing including understanding Cellular Automata, animation, algorithmically-generated art, and color theory just off the top of my head.

Pryor Faces is a simple sketch based on the idea of pointillism via sampling.

This is what happens when you're sick in bed and Brewsters Millions comes on which of course leads to Richard Pryor. I really have no words to describe his story, so I think you should check it out. Here's a selection of words from the wiki entry: brothel, prostitute, stabbing, Nina Simone, domestic abuse.

Back to the sketch, you can vary the sampled circle size via the y coordinate and the sample frequency via the x coordinate.

Candle Monster, a Processing monster - inspired by the exercise Dan Schiffman once gave to his students.

I've definitely been getting back into Processing these days; except this time I'm trying to focus a little.  Instead of wondering how I could jump into building the ulitmate Java-based Processing visual/audio experience I've been doing exercises as I find them online.

Now I just have to get some commenting up...

So why host your own blog these days when there are so many open source options?  I think I have one of the few justifiable special-cases... I intend to use this space as a testing ground for next-generation ui/web ideas, in areas ranging from pure JS to Java/OGL integrations to maybe even some Flash.  I expect only some of this to be cross-browser only since I'm specifically going to be focusing on cutting-to-bleeding edge tech.

This blog is powered by the result of an off and on effort to build a web framework to iterate quickly.  The gyst of it is not just the usual MVC blah blah, but also a means to ingest and produce content based on variety of heterogenous sources such as xml,json,csv , you name it.  Ultimately these facilities will be used to be the back-end supporting any intelligence the UI will be exposing.

Ultimately web framework is not a very open-sourceable effort, as it's very homegrown in it's architecture and integrates pretty concretely with other projects-it's very tailored to what I want to be able to do.  If you're a geek reading this, then you're probably guessing that there must be two major components to this, a translation framework, as well as the web infrastructure, and you're right!

I might be talking about the web framework a little more in the future, but for now I won't since I consider it the boring part of the development effort.  Next time I update, hopefully I'll be discussing the exciting part!

I'm exhausted but elated.  Mosaic of Subcultures finally launches.