Author: bookooBread

bookooBread – Environment

Unity Skin Environment

https://leahmins.itch.io/unity-skin-environment

So I started this project, technically, at the beginning of this semester. The character you see there was created, modeled, rigged, textured (although the uv map didn’t get carried over so it didn’t work for this demo) by me for my 3D animation class. The animation you see here was done on Mixamo just for sake of time because I couldn’t get the idle animation done yet, but I did animate practically the exact same thing all myself too – you just won’t be seeing it for this demo. I had imagined an environment all along for my character, but I didn’t know if I’d be able to in time so this project was a perfect opportunity to do that. The terrain you see here I created in Maya and then brought to Substance Painter, and then to Unity. Connie and I worked on bringing in the animations I created and then scripted two third person cameras that you could switch between with the spacebar. This is definitely a work in progress for me – although I am proud of what I have so far. I hope to continue this in the future to fix the things that went wrong and keep adding on to this world!

bookooBread-ImageProcessor

 

First of all, I spent way too much time on the Situated Eye part of this deliverable so I didn’t have much time for this. I plan on playing with Runway a lot more in the future when I have time.

My idea was to use the text to image generator to create some weird ass visuals… and that sort of worked?

But then, I wanted to connect these images to other models and use them to style other images/video or mix it with a face. None of these worked and I think that’s because I just haven’t spent enough time working with Runway yet so I’m not quite sure how all the tools work. But I will keep at it since it is so so goddamn cool!

bookooBread-TeachableMachine

Hand Gesture Teachable Machine Model w/ Arduino Connection/Soon-to-be Arduino Kinetic Sculpture

So, I started out doing something kind of boring where I was going to teach a model to recognize when I touch my hair (nervous habit of mine) and make an annoying sound. This hopefully would’ve helped me break that habit. However! I started thinking about a project I had started in my physical computing class where I was going to write a hand tracking/gesture recognition program to control an Arduino kinetic sculpture. I am currently using the openCV library for Processing… but Teachable Machine offers up a different approach. My idea was: if I could use TM as my hand gesture recognition model… this project would probably be much simpler on the programming end and then I could focus more on the visual/sculpture. So… I brought my model into p5.js and researched how to get serial output from there. This is where I found P5.serialport, which is  a p5.js library that allows your p5 sketch to communicate with Arduino.

https://github.com/p5-serial/p5.serialport

https://github.com/p5-serial/p5.serialcontrol

Teachable Machine Model Demonstration

So, this model is pretty buggy. Luckily redoing the teachable machine part is fairly simple, so I will continue to test and refine this until it works properly and easily. I also want to try out some other classes that I didn’t include in this demo. I had made a hand waving and finger gun class but it seemed to mess things up a bit, so I disabled them for this demo.

P5.js Code

https://editor.p5js.org/bookooBread/sketches/4MgV6eh-r

Arduino Code

Arduino Circuit Set Up

I have not been able to work on the actual arduino sculpture much yet. So far, I just have the Arduino controls set up to 3 basic servos so I know things are working and its receiving a connection.

Downloading the P5.serialserver

For P5 to communicate with the Arduino, I need the webSocket server (p5.serialcontrol). Unfortunately, I tried to download the GUI from github but my computer does not recognize it as safe software – so that didn’t work.

Then I tried to run the other option of using it without the GUI and running it from my command line… that also didn’t work…

So basically, I cannot go any further with this project until I figure out how to work around my computer blocking me from running/downloading this app. But! I am optimistic!

Also, I apologize for this extremely long post!

bookooBread-GPT2

heimlich exhibits one which is identical with its opposite, unheimlich does not stand for things which are not identical, or identical with their opposite. The same applies to die unheimlich (though, perhaps, that should be pronounced einfach unheimlich rather than unheimlich).

Freud’s concept of “parapraxis,” the inadvertent slip of the tongue that reveals a hidden truth, applied to his theories about repression. Many people have described things that don’t make sense or seem disconnected in a particular scenario to be the result of suppressed memories, for example, someone being kidnapped and put in a basement for weeks in an abusive household where they were either starved or fed a slop-like food. A person coming to, having experienced a ton of conflicting emotions (which was essentially the default setting for them, since they had never been allowed to
I was trying to see if I could use this to finish my art history presentation in a believable way… turns out I cannot.

bookooBread – faceReadings

  • In the John Oliver video, I was really struck by the story of the Brown student getting falsely accused of a terrorist attack. With the current biases  in facial recognition technology, it is likely that stories like this will continue to occur. Our law enforcement agencies currently want to pin crimes to minorities – and this technology will only help them do that.
  • “Any face that deviates from the established norm will be harder to detect”- Joy Buolamwini –> This line sort of stuck with me. It is one of the points of the video and goes along with what I was saying before. The “norms” that exist in our culture are heavily rooted in white supremacy – so as Joy explains in the video – current facial technology accepts those conditions and uses them as norms.

bookooBread -08 – LookingOutwards

http://www.sterlingcrispin.com/data-masks.html

What first caught my eye with this project was the texture of the masks. I am fascinated with certain textures, and these masks fall into that category. Some of them look like they could be rocks, and others look like a bunch of cotton balls stuck together or something. Even though it’s sort of not the point of the project, I am very intrigued by how they look. These masks are supposed to make a face unrecognizable to surveillance and facial recognition algorithms – and I think that this is a really interesting-looking approach to doing that.

bookooBread – Code Bogus

The Actual Game:

I did not want to publish yet because it is not quite done yet. But, right now is a good stopping point. The game also has music but I cannot get the audio to work right when I screen record so I will hopefully demo it in my browser for the class.

Game Generator Program with Truchet Tiles:

Final version – Golan helped with cleaning/reworking my sleepy code so it would actually work 🙂

Original version – I overcomplicated things way too much! I confused myself and set out to do things that may have unattainable within my time frame (one night…)

Original idea v2:

Original idea v1:

Explanation:

This project was originally supposed to be the story of the only dream I have ever been able to remember. I was psyched with the idea, but then when it came to actually doing it, I really wasn’t all that thrilled. While this visual style is for some people, it’s not really my cup of tea. I also tend not to gravitate toward storytelling (at least this type of narrative storytelling) in my art. These things combined with a number of computer troubles over the past week (losing my game data, spilling coffee on my laptop and having to get a knew one) made for a pretty not-so-great project. I thought to myself: “why am I forcing myself to do something I’m not that interested in?” – and then an idea struck me – to do something completely abstract and non-narrative :). I was brainstorming with Golan in office hours, and then he challenged me to make a  program that would computationally generate a Bitsy game with the rooms as patterns. With a short lesson on Truchet Tiles and a simple algorithm for the most basic pattern he sent me off to work. Now, being as tired as I was from previous and continued lack of sleep, my coding brain was extremely slow and messy. This morning I had to get some more help from Golan to turn my code into something not so messy and buggy. I know if I had a clear head I could have made it work so I am not going to be too hard on myself… my brain was working at practically 20% the whole night.

Now, for the actual code explanation. I wrote the program in Java to output text in the format of the Bitsy data file. I generated new rooms (which can be adjusted but I have it at 13 for the demo), a randomized color palette for each room, exits for each room, and of course the tiles. I made several sets of tiles using Bitsy’s interface that corresponded to a Truchet Tile pattern and labeled them with a lowercase letter. Then in my code, I created a 2-dimensional array to store these sets of tiles, and randomly pulled a set for each room. The tiles are then placed in a 16×16 grid using a nested for-loop and alternated or randomly  placed. While I could’ve have explored the Truchet Tile patterns so, so, so much more – I unfortunately did not have time. However I will hopefully be coming back to this in the future when I do. I also added a loop of music for each room in the game – but my screen recorder was messing up the audio for some reason so I could not include that in this post – though I could demo it.

Although this project is nowhere near meeting my standards and I could’ve added way more complexity to the patterns – to put it simply – I ran out of time and my brain is just not working clear enough to think through code anymore. So, I had to stop at some point or I would not be able to turn anything in. I want to say a major thank you to Golan for helping me out in this pickle I got myself into :).

Eventually, I hope to upload this as a tool onto itch.io!