Luke Agius found this inspiring artist who generates art through code. Actually he calls his code as art, and not the artifacts of the code.

http://www.joshuadavis.com/tag/interactive/

Find some videos about Joshua Davis on vimeo:

http://vimeo.com/videos/search:joshua%20davis

Some patterns we see on animals can be easily reproduced using Cellular Automata.

The following website uses a java applet to generate fish textures, and also a leopard texture:

http://www.rufenacht.com/CA/AnimalSim.html

Here’s another which also shows an animation of the iterations to get to the texture of a leopard:

http://classes.yale.edu/Fractals/Panorama/Biology/Leopard/Leopard.html

Also I found another interesting CA for Leopards:

http://jonathanpace.wordpress.com/2008/10/31/cellular-automata-how-the-leopard-gets-its-spots/

And here’s a playground for Cellular Automata to experiment with different rules. It starts with Conway’s Game of Life:

http://www.masterbaboon.com/2009/02/2d-cellular-automata/

Don’t forget to try 3456 / 1234567 in the above playground to get a leopard pattern.

Once you get a basic pattern, you can apply programmatically some effects typically used in photoshop.

Excellent procedural animation by doing several iterations (Genetic
algorithm) for training a neural net to learn how to behave to
simulate muscles/neural system.
A
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Thanks for Matthew Micallef for sharing.

Another interesting link on computer generated animation from Luke Agius, a student at SMIIT, was forwarded to me to share it with the other creative students. Some of the sketches have been done in Processing. It’s a pity they don’t give the code to see how they have done some of the animations.

There is an interesting PDF on how to pick the perfect colors from an image to create a color scheme. It goes into practical details on how to create analogous, complement, split complement, complement/analogous, analogous/complement, coupled with what kind of message you want to convey to the viewer.

View more interesting PDFs from Before & After design magazine.

For more information on color theory with inspirational designs visit Color Theory for Designers.

I have stumbled across some processing code that visualizes how Bittorrent works. Most of us have used this technology to download huge files, and we only know that there are people who have all the file (seeds), and others who have only parts of the file (peers). This sketch gives a good animated view of how the peers communicate with each other. Also you can interact with it by +,-  to add/subtract peers or hit s to add a seed.

You can view interactive applet here.

Luke Agius, a Creative Computing student at SMIIT, forwarded me a very inspirational article, where Jacob Melvin found his dream job. The trick was building a portfolio while he was at university with something he liked doing. He was always fascinated by games, especially the cut scenes. He made a full 3d game, although he admits that he doesn’t like all the tedious details of game dev. He ended up in the movie industry with his portfolio. Read the full article.

Thanks for sharing Luke.

Dirk Schembri, 2nd year student at SMIIT, forwarded me some very interesting you-tube interviews of top game developers. I have watched all 12 of Uncharted 2 – Behind the Scenes. All the details from motion-capture, to design, to animation, to the cell chip’s SPUs and how they all work as a team in a flat organization – No dragging meetings, they just encourage the developers to get in the code and add their dreams. When they finish a project, they also give the developers 3 months time to come up with some creative ideas that might be introduced in the next project. I would start the Naughty-Dog-behind-the-scenes videos from the first part. There are 12 in all.

John Carmack (id Software – creators of Doom):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWRctnQU2F4

Gabe Newell (Valve Software – creators of Half-life):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RNXIhccXLc

Uncharted 2 – Behind the scenes (Naughty-dog – creators of Crash Bandicoot)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kzo9FrRoPno
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6t9pt84uXag

Engineering Halo 3 (Bungie Software)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuDcP4tFOwU

Thanks Dirk.

Enjoy!

Robert Vella, a student in CIS112 has created an animated Julia Set using processing. Here’s a description of how it works:

A complex number is a number in the form “a + bi” — example 1 + 5i — where i represents the square root of -1 — which technically doesn’t exist. Therefore a in “a + bi” is called the real part of a complex number, while b is called the imaginary part. Complex numbers have an interesting property which make the creation of this sketch possible.

Because complex numbers have two dimensions (a and b) they can be plotted on a graph as vectors. This is called the complex plane. Like a vector, the magnitude of complex numbers can be calculated using the pythegorean equation c = sqrt(a^2 + b^2)

An iterative function is a function where the result of the previous iteration is used in the current iteration. So the iterative function z[n + 1]  = z[n] + 2 would be expended as 0 + 2 + 2 + 2… etc.

Iterative functions either tend to infinity or to 0 as they are expanded.

It was discovered that the iterative function z[n + 1] = z[n]^2 + c — where both c and z are both complex number — will definately tend to infinity if the magnitude of z is ever >= 2. By sampling the number of iterations it takes for the magnitude z to become >= 2, we get a different value for each instance of z and c. Those values of z and c which will never exceed 2 are called the classic julia set, and because of them it is neccessary to set a limit to the sampling — the higher the limit, the greater the detail.

By mapping each pixel on the screen to a value of z between -2 – 2i and 2 + 2i, you can actually render a fractal by seeing how many iterations it takes for the magnitude of z to reach 2, and converting that number to a color. By sampling different continuos values of c each frame you can also animate it. In my case I am sampling c by moving around the complex plane in a double spiral.

I remember Roboblitz was using ProFX, a library which helped author high quality textures in a few kilobytes rather than huge bitmaps. This made them compress hundreds of megs worth of textures into less than 50megs to be able to publish it on xbox live back in 2006. ProFX has now been replaced by a newer, easier-to-use library Substance Air. You can create compelling 1024×1024 highly detailed textures in just 2k!