Randleaf goes with the flow.

I really, really can’t stay behind if even the Finder decides to use Coverflow. So I decided to add a coverflow interface to a project; Randleaf, the OpenGL abstract graphics generator has been command-line for a while, so I am working on getting it a bit fancy enough for public demo’ing. This really clicks into the great announcement I will be making today, so stay tuned.

App news update, Randleaf á la carte and more.

Randleaf is still progressing, albeit slowly. I’ve taken the task of doing some rough semiotics on the produce of this little program, and I am almost done making a few categories with guidelines and ‘creation flags’ that really 99% of all generated images adhere to. Uh, I could say, Randleaf is going á la carte; it’s becoming increasingly simple to define what image you want to see coming out of it.

I had proposed this analysis of Randleaf’s products to my Illustration teacher, and he accepted it as a free project, so that’s good - I can rarely ever make my personal work rhyme with my education; graphic design isn’t new media, after all, and not all media is fun to me (don’t ask me anything about video, I don’t really like it).

In the meantime, the blog’s uneasy silence is caused by the impending release of new blog styles, the Cocoia main site, and several personal projects including but not limited to improving the overall look of Mac OS X open-source utilities and my two (I’d almost say, make that three) apps. At the moment, you could say my day is getting a bit hectic with projects;

1. School work (obligatory illustrations, essays, etc.)
2. Timezones 1.0 (due May 15th)
3. CCC presentation(s) (due for submission before May 15th)
4. Daily build and troubleshoot of Praetorian and iSight Expert; I switch products as I feel like it, but admittedly, Praetorian is seeing a lot of attention as it’s data management and import had to be redone -again- when I discovered FreeRADIUS has raddb inconsistencies across versions.
5. Personal website work.
6. Other commissioned work I am not at liberty to discuss.
7. When my girlfriend’s lucky, personal work-outs for actual physique.

Busy? I feel at times, it kills me, I’ve had an incredible headache for two weeks now, which gets paralyzing at moments. Fortunately, my code is starting to make a lot more sense; I am really getting around the whole unit-testing paradigm and all my projects are seeing a lot of attention to details and cleanup. I strongly suspect the whole headache fuzz is mostly caused by a lack of rest, which I think I can do better with. Sometimes I can’t even grok my reference documents or get my mind around mentally sculpting concepts.

On a side note, the OS X spell-checker wanted to correct “FreeRADIUS” with “ferrari’s”. I suppose it has the same ring to it. I imagined actually writing an app that manages ferrari’s on your Mac, but that’s just too much fun to bear.

Arthur’s Matrix

For someone way out there.

Click here for a bigger version.

Some work with inspiration from a Futurama quote and the Matrix. “There is no two.”

I got a week of vacation coming up. I’ve still got a lot of work to do for school, but Praetorian still has a healthy amount of hours going in it every day. Some questions were raised about Praetorian recently, so I’ll post a Q&A soon. And my lecture-in-the-works for the CCC is progressing great.

Just a table content in the works, but that’s pretty much decided on. It’s up to the CCC committee to approve my paper and presentation before May 15th. So, I’m quite curious if I will make the grade.

Please keep giving input about my apps in the making! The most stupid question is the one never asked. Email’s open 24 hours a day.

Randleaf.

Okay, I’ve finally settled on a name. Randleaf is a modular 3d and 2d compositing graphic generator, for now quite slow. With the additions I made to the code today (gradient background and some other visualization tweaks), I am proud to say Randleaf has entered a whole new phase with it’s new graphics modes.

These two samples show a new, dynamic PNG overlay (great to trace back what I did) and gradient background support, which, in my opinion, adds a lot to the whole effect. Of course, I picked some good samples out of the 80-or so renders, but it does show what direction I am going.

Generating 2d abstracts.

I’ve had a lot of verbal reactions and discussions in the last few days over my novel ‘application’ that generates three-dimensional abstract imagery. The most prominent design feature I wanted to see was the generation of something I once had a ‘monopoly’ on in terms of tutorials; the so-called ‘tech circles’.

You can’t escape them in abstract art. Seemingly randomly generated, these circles feature all sorts of strange cutouts and details, sometimes text or small illustrations, and always layered. My whole adventure into OpenGL began a month ago, when I saw a movie; Ghost in the Shell 2. It had this completely cool way to visualize a computer-(more specifically, a firewall)’s running state. I won’t go into detail as to how it looks, I’d prefer you look at a screenshot (it’s actually FAR better in the movie, do check it out, after the ‘Dollhouse’ scene)

As you can see, it’s quite aesthetically pleasing. Stop to consider how this would look if this were to visualize, say, network activity, or my idea, firewall logs. This would be almost like iPulse in 3d (and ohh, do I love iPulse!). So, just blurting out in all honesty, I thought that was so horny, I just had to learn OpenGL and do something like this. I immediately ran into the obvious ‘it’s harder than it looks’, then entered the ‘ah, do I really have to do this with OpenGL?’ phase, and eventually settled with just picking up a good book. I made a horrible first mockup with a kqueue for checking the logs and a custom view. It wasn’t that great. So, I abandoned it for a while, working on my prime projects (Praetorian, iSight Expert) and well, messed with OpenGL in my spare time. Looked into Python application, the Cocoa / Quartz side of things, and got more interested. I am now considering to pick up a book on Quartz programming.

Back on topic; it’s been creating an array of objects and randomly assigning attribute values that brought me to these landscapes. After a while, you feel like testing your hardware and you just expand the array to see how far you can go. Fun ensued.
Now, having made my first real worthy GL-powered app, I want to expand on it’s functionality. I am doing expirimental hi-res (2000 px high and above) rendering, and trying to get the whole thing a bit more modular to make things like an external rendering application possible, and I want it’s product to be a more complete graphic. I could change some objects at random into letters and “+” marks, but that doesn’t really cut it for me (besides, they get swamped by the countless other objects or gruesomely distorted, which I can help but refuse to). In any case, I’ve tried to get more control on my produce, and it’s getting there… I now have the ability to magically dissolve a ‘room’.

The text and few ‘2d’ additions, as you can see, have been added with very sophisticated scripts. No, actually, it’s just a PNG with some lines and dots on it with text being changed per rendered frame. It will be quite trivial to just build a library of 2d graphics that this program can just apply on demand, but I am really looking for something that will generate me some 2d - like those tech circles. I hope I’ll round up a solution for that in the next month. Any thoughts are welcome, as usual.

Homework? Hee hee!

It’s very ironic, that this OpenGL ‘project’ started when I got bored with Art History assignments I had to do in little time, because right now, I need to finish a type poster (of my new font, Acreola) for presentation Monday, and I was all like - “Ahh, now I need to make a graphic, that’ll take some time— Oh, wait! I don’t need to do anything at all!”
And I just made a script to sequentially stuff some data into the still unnamed Purdy-Image-O-Matic™ and got about forty images.

It didn’t only make me one graphic, but the lighting glitched out in one render and it turned out so well I couldn’t take it to keep it on my drive and not on my blog. So, I let it out on you all. I should really put some more time into this little ‘app’.

And I’ll tell you, I made up some great name for this one. Get the wallpaper size of ‘Pipeline of the Branch Predictor’ (1440×900, sorry guys) here.

I still want feedback on this - what do you want to see?

Heart-eating experiment continued.

Building further on my experiments with OpenGL.

As you can see, some color modulation and a post-process blur with additive blending does give it an edge. It’s nice, soft, and scenic. It can output a cool 40 images per minute, in it’s current, raw form. I may push it out, once I get things working like ‘true’ 3d scenics with shading.

Because xyz (Nate) asked for some details on this, I’ll happily disclose some. My ’script’ (it used Python first, now most of it is just bare C++ or Objective-C) receives random input from any source (say, you could pipe your chat log into it, or the contents of your favorite MP3) and processes it into various arrays of data. It then randomly selects values to assign to properties of a hard-coded array of 3d objects, e.g. cubes, planes, and lines and their X, Y, Z positions and distortions. Most data, not being really random, create interesting patterns from strange perspectives. It uses basic lighting for every (simplified), depth testing for overlapping shapes, and depth-of-field (limited and simple). Overall, it looks landscape-like, or like it’s some sort of room or space. I think most outputted images are pretty much industry-grade, I made a mock-up of one of the generated images as a book cover.

For now, it’s just an experiment. Some other cool graphic stuff from my classmate, Jelmar. He’s working on ‘Sixty Pounder’, a great characteristic ‘fat face’ for expressive messages. As quoted from Jules & co;

Jelmar, and me, of course, enjoy feedback like Nate’s. Please, let us know what you want to know, or what you want to see! I’ll upload some wallpaper-sized images (any idea on sizes? I already have 1920×1200 written down). Email me!

Digital abstract artists, eat your heart out.

Generated with ‘random’ data and the scripts that will soon replace digital abstract artists.

This just rendered for ages. It didn’t have any progress, because, hey, I’m not going to write a specific raytrace renderer in OpenGL, I have no idea how to do that. But this is fun stuff.

Edit: I feel like requests! Send me your ‘idea’ (it can be a few words, like I did here) and I’ll try to generate a random image out of it that is somewhat related. It would be fun to make a weekly out of this.