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BB Gun

For this project, I wanted to recreate the classic carnival BB gun game where there participant shots out a red star on a paper target. Well, I didn’t get the target, but I got the BB’s working in 3D space. Below is the video:

The user points the BB Gun with the mouse pointer and presses the spacebar to shoot BB’s. The BB’s are created using memo‘s MSA physics addon for Cinder. Special thanks to memo for his MSA Physics demo.

generative beat painter | live online

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Revamped Version

• Coming soon! Modifications based on received feedback.
• A version which doesn’t wrap around and produces an infoviz-esque image of the entire song.
• And if it doesn’t give me too much trouble, add a UI to select a song to play.

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from Monday

Code lives here.

If anyone was interested, I presented with
FantomenK’s – Taking a Nap in the Jungle
and
We are Happy Planet’s – Time (remix)

You can screw around with songs of your choice. There’s no interface unfortunately, but just stick your song of choice into the data folder and add this in setup after the other songs:

song = minim.loadFile("YOUR_FILE_NAME_HERE.mp3", 2048);

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Process

Get the pdf presentation.

> previous blog post

> minim beat energy
> wasd keyboard controls

> minim frequency energy

> minim fft

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Retrospective

Some goals:

1. Present on Monday (Yay, it happened!), and related…
2. Scope, scope, scope into a short doable project while keeping it meaningful.
3. Leverage strengths more (visuals).
4. Create something that involves input from the user.
5. Make it fun, toy like.

It feels good to accomplish this.

I am pretty happy with the result regarding time and concept. As for what could have gone better, aside from the UI, I wish I had more time to read up on FFTs or another interesting way to plot the y-axis. My method ends up looking reasonable, but more nuance would have been ideal.

Thanks for reading, hope you guys got a kick out of it.

For my generative art project, I want to create some sort of simulation inspired by the movement of rain on car windows. During a recent road trip, I was reminded of how interesting it is watching raindrops make their way rightwards on the glass, eating other drops of water in front of them and leaving a little poop trail of droplets behind them. I feel like this project might require some sophisticated mathematics to get it to look realistic, and I’m also worried about how hard it would be to create convincing graphics. Because of these worries, I might try to abstract the concept a little more so that it’s easier to accomplish but still echoes the feel of rain on a car window.

I would like to commit to creating a game during this project. Specifically, I am thinking of a music game, one where the levels are generated by a user chosen file. The program would analyze things like frequency, amplitude, or pitch and then render them as enemies on a (x, y) coordinate grid. Possible variables include coordinate, color, size, and fuzziness. For simplicity’s sake, I’d probably start with just one of the properties.

If I get something good working, the next step would be to add some incentive to shooting down these enemies. I’m thinking that if the player allowed the enemy to grow, it would distort the song the program is playing.

Okay, so it’d might end up more as an artsy-ass shooter than a shooter game per say, but the bottom-line is that I’d like to make it work with any music file the user throws into the code and have it output something that makes sense :)

For this project, I’ve been thinking about what I see at the “canon” of generative algorithms and techniques — I keep seeing words like flocking, perlin noise function, what have you, thrown around the internetosphere. I think it would be worthwhile to actually try to do one of these things – especially given that I’ve been avoiding the more math-y parts of computational art/design and I really need to sink my teeth into it. I’m not too sure of form right now – I’m thinking either a poster/print or a video demo. We shall see.

Stanza

Stanza is an artist who makes a lot of generative art from a variety of sources. This one is from his automaton series. I like this one the most out of his work because I feel that a lot of generative art looks really messy and unorganized despite all the rigorous math and computation that goes into him, but this series seems very crisp and like there is a clear structure behind it. In general, I like the use of color in his art, though this piece is not a prime example.

Quasimodo

I can’t get a picture to upload, but here is a project created by this guy that just generates a bunch of bezier curves that look really elegant and smooth. Kind of mesmerizing to watch, although I wish there were some color variation.

Klaus Sutner

The Farey sequence and Ford circles.

Iterating riffle shuffle.

One of my professors really enjoys visualizations of complex theoretical computer science concepts. Admittedly, they aren’t the prettiest because his goal is more to show the pattern than to make a work of art. But they are very very technical, and it’s pretty impressive to see these abstract concepts described in images. He has a gallery of these images here.