screenprinting project

Really bad at updating this dang thing! Argh! Well, let's make up for lost time.  Here's the run down of the last couple weeks (minus thanksgiving week).  It turns out I'm much worse at screenprinting after having not done it for so long, took me until literally the last two layers to get back in the flow of it.  And tragedy struck on the last layer (which sort of influenced my decision to make it the last layer).  A hole! In my lovely screen :(.  Here are some photos:

So sad.  I also did not get as many layers as I was hoping for due to time constraints and it taking much longer than anticipated.

As for the splattering, I rolled a dice for the quadrant and the number for the first few layers, then started splattering, then started masking and splattering, and then more masking and splattering and then finally masking, painting, and splattering for a few layers (the last two to be specific).  If I were to continue, I would continue the masking, painting, and splattering until there were very few places not covered by the screenfiller.

final, update

This is an update on the final, not the final update :P.  I've done a proof of concept run.  Man, has it been a looooong time since I've done this.  I'm out of practice.  Also, it came out looking like some terrible pink camo.  BUT, that's mostly the color choice.  And the fact that I only have three colors.  There's not too much contrast going on here.  I might change this up a little and do something a little different.  I have two screens, so maybe I'll try these simultaneously.  I'm considering doing the initial dots as random splatters, but after that, just enlarging them ever so slightly each layer.  Anyway, here's a pic of my proofs of concept.  In all their teen girl redneck glory.

final project brainstorming

Little behind on this blog, but here i'll braindump my ideas for the final project.  Don't have many yet, but I'm hoping one of these will work:

1. Reverse Jackson Pollock fractal exploration screenprint.  This one is very non-technical.  Basically, I will do a sort of opposite jackson pollock.  I will take a screen, and each layer I will paint splatter some screenfiller onto it, then print a layer, and continue for 30 or so layers.  This should create a jackson pollock-like print, but it should look different as the drops will be subtractive, not additive.  It's also an exploration of his process taken to a different medium.  I'm not sure if this idea is appropriate as it's very non-technical.

2. My second idea is a continuation of the strange attractors, but adding a fourth dimension and creating an animation of them over time.  I would have the different start values fluctuate or maybe the input a, b, c values fluctuate.  I would have to experiment with that.  The downside to this project is that I'm not sure if it's an appropriate scope for a final project.  I'm afraid it might not be grand enough.

3. My third idea is to do screenprinting (I really like screenprinting and have been looking for an excuse to do it again... it's been a few years and that makes me sad).  This time, though, I would do cellular automata, a 2D representation of a 1D cellular automaton.  Sort of similar to amber's bead canvas.  Only I would change each layer slightly.  So the seed on the first layer would be 1000101, and the seed on the second layer would be 1100101, and so on and so forth.  The difficulty with this is that I would have to completely clean the screen between each layer which takes significantly more time than just cleaning it of ink.  Due to time constraints I would have to create much fewer layers.  Registering the layers would be more difficult, too, probably impossible to get very precise registration (registration is the act of lining up the layers so that they don't show beneath, when something is mis-registered you see a ghosting of a particular color, noticeable sometimes in magazines or newspapers if the printing got off).

strange attractors

Okay, so I waited a little too much until the last minute to print these off, BUT here are some of the images i got.

Both of these are the lorenz attractor.  The rossler i was working on was too dense for the computer... so it kinda would freeze it.

strange attractors

gah! i'm terrible at this whole blog thing, always have been.  Anyway, to try to make up for some lost time, here is where i'm at.

I've got the Rossler and Lorenz attractor creating themselves and rendering themselves gorgeously.

Here are some pics:

That is the lorenz attractor

This is the Rossler attractor.

I don't know about the positioning/coloration/glow on the rossler attractor.  I like the Lorenz a lot, I think I'm going to print that one for sure.  Tomorrow I'm going to print as many as they'll let me and then frame them (if they have frames) and hang them in the hallway.  To truly simulate the gallery experience :P.

chaotic systems brainstorming

I'm not sure what I want to do for the chaotic systems.  I do know that I want it to involve strange attractors, but I'm not sure how to make those art...  Let's look at some pretty pictures.

Helios by Nathan Selikoff

Update:

I've decided to just make beautiful strange attractors.  I'll probably make a series of each attractor and render them out in maya.  Here is a wip of the Lorenz attractor:

I still need to get the circles oriented to the curve and I'm not sure the effect I'll go for.  I might change my mind and make them spheres and render them as star like objects or something.  I'm not sure at this point.  I might also select all the curves and loft them together and put some crazy texture on them.  I will have to play with it.

genetic l-systems

meant to update the blog sooner.  Life got a bit in the way with this project, but I will put some screenshots and my thoughts on it after class.  I have a rogue seg fault, too, that I'm not sure how to track down.  I know where it is and what's causing it, but I don't know what is causing the cause of the seg fault if that makes sense.  Oh, nevermind, fixed the seg fault.  I was just doing something stupid in my code... the usual cause of seg faults :P.

Here are some screenshot

As you can see, I did not get the glowing effect to work.  I might still work on this because I feel like that would be a cool effect to have in my skills.

project 2 - L systems update

Still working on the second project.  I've sort of gotten my idea a little more fleshed out.  I still want to do L-systems, but I don't think I will be able to do them in maya (for sure) due to me not wanting to learn python AND l systems.  So that leaves me with opengl and c++.  I could try to do trees and other plant things, but that will probably leave both me and Phil disappointed because there is no way they will look as nice as if they were done in maya.  SO, that leads me to my current idea.  Instead of trees with leaves and whatnot, I'm thinking neon colored branches.  If I could get them to glow a little that would be even more awesome, but I'm not set on that.  I'm thinking a random color for each branch.  Or maybe even an L-system derived color.

The main functions of the program will stay the same, though.  There will be four windows and each will have a randomly generated starting "tree" drawn in them.  The user will move a slider on each window that says how much they want that "tree's" genetics to affect the next generation.  Then the user will click a button to move to the next generation.  And so on and so on throughout the generations.

reference links for me:

bloom:
http://prideout.net/archive/bloom/

gpu gems chapter 21 - glow:
http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems/gpugems_ch21.html 

http://www.avatar.com.au/courses/Lsystems/

project 2 - L systems?

Still haven't quite settled on an idea for project 2.  I think the evolving knitting patterns might be too complex of a problem.  It's not the genetic part I can't figure out how to solve, necessarily, it's the reading in and displaying parts I can't figure out how to do.  Due to time constraints, I think it might be better to move onto a different idea.  I was really intrigued by the L-systems in class.  Sadly for my education, that was the first time I'd really known what they are.  I've heard of them, but it always seemed like a huge mystery.  Like there was a black box called L-systems and stuff was put in one side and amazing plant like structures came out the other.  I'm going to try to do some preliminary l-system examples in maya and then maybe I'll try to make something out of them.  Maybe an evolving city scape made of L-system buildings!  Can that be done?  I have no idea.  I'm just throwing things out there right now.  Stream of consciousness so to speak.


Alright, started looking into l-systems and I found a couple of tutorials/links that might help me out.

http://www.fundza.com/algorithmic/lsystem/basic/installation.html

and

http://www.fundza.com/algorithmic/lsystem/basic/index.html

also, linking to the previous class's website.  It has nice examples of previous projects (some using l-systems):

http://www.viz.tamu.edu/courses/viza626/12Spring/

net logo

playing around with netlogo like was assigned in class.  I'm taking the genDrift P local program and adding in mutation to it.  Here is the code:

to setup
  clear-all
  ask patches  ;; randomly set the patches' colors
    [ set pcolor (random colors) * 10 + 5
        if pcolor = 75  ;; 75 is too close to another color so change it to 125
          [ set pcolor 125 ] ]
  reset-ticks
end

to go
  ask patches [
    ;; each patch randomly picks a neighboring patch
    ;; to copy a color from
    set pcolor [pcolor] of one-of neighbors
  ]
 
 
  if (ticks mod 10000) = 0
  [
    ask n-of 1000 patches [ set pcolor (random colors) * 10 + 5]
  ]
  tick
;;  move-to one-of patches with [pcolor = (random colors) * 10 + 5] ;; randomly set the patches' colors
;;    [ set pcolor (random colors) * 10 + 5
;;        if pcolor = 75  ;; 75 is too close to another color so change it to 125
;;          [ set pcolor 125 ] ]
;;    ]
end


; Copyright 1997 Uri Wilensky.
; See Info tab for full copyright and license.

project 2 brainstorming...

This is just a post to use as a repository for ideas for project 2, evolved systems.  I want to download netlogo and see if I can't get any ideas from those sample programs, too.

1. evolved knitting chart - the user inputs several to a few seed knitting charts and they then evolve, each time with the user picking the new parents from the previous generation.  then, I will knit up a few of them.

Here are some knitting charts:

Knitting lace is an art and I think it'd be cool to be able to evolve lace patterns.  Whether or not these will be actually knitted is debatable and mostly depends on time constraints.

And as an explanation for the charts, each square represents one stitch.  The greyed out squares are placeholders and don't exist, they are used to maintain the grid pattern of the stitches and should just be ignored.  For an example, the plain white boxes are just plain knit stitches, the circles are yarn-overs (which leave a hole in the knitting), the upside down v's are a type of decrease (usually knit two together).  The major challenge with this would be maintaining a constant number of stitches in each row so as to avoid topological mistakes.  For instance, if you have a row of all decreases, then the next row would be half the size.  So there would have to be an equal number of decreases and increases in each row, or they'd have to pair.  Sort of like parentheses must be paired up.

and of course, here are some pictures of actual knitted lace:

project 1

This project did not turn out ideally, to say the least.  However, we did learn a lot and got some unexpected results that were kind of cool.  The speakers, even with an amp did not produce enough vibration to make the non newtonian liquid do anything other than sit there.  Since that was not going to work, we started experimenting with other materials.  We tried salt, chalk dust, and water.  The best one was water, the sound waves created really interesting ripple patterns.  We then tried dust on the water to try to emphasize the ripples and that worked surprisingly well, out of all the tests we did.  The dust swirled around the water being moved by the music.

speakers

With the go ahead to work with Tiffany for this project, our first major challenge was creating speakers for cheap. Since neither of us have the funds to really devote a ton of money to this project, our goal was something that sounded good and was as inexpensive as possible. I think this might work amazingly well.





And since it's made with a styrofoam plate, we don't even have to stretch any rubber or anything over the cone.  It takes WAY less shaping than other tutorials we've found, and most importantly, it's LOUD!  The largest purchase will probably be either the neodymium magnets, the copper wire (depending on how much it takes for one speaker), or the audio jacks.  Here is the original article on make magazine: http://makezine.com/projects/styrofoam-plate-speaker/.

reading and thinking about randomness

Catching up on the reading before class today and brainstorming for our random project.

Here are some ideas I have so far, since this is one of those projects that can be done well not on the computer, I'm thinking about doing a textile project.  Then again, it's due in a week, so I actually probably shouldn't.  I suppose I should make something in code, but it's hard thinking of stuff that hasn't been done before.  I'm browsing the web and flickr, trying to find inspiration.

assigned reading: CBN chapter 20 and Bentley (2002)

some other ideas:


and:


Take these and maybe with a group project (pretty please?) with Tiffany, separate  the track into bass, mid, and high and assign each a color.  Then put some non-newtonian colored fluid in it and let it go.

Link to Tiffany's post: http://generateatrandom.blogspot.com/2013/09/up-to-chance.html