oneirographics

For my one minute video, I basically started off with the idea that I want to create a desert scene in Unity, a 3D game engine, and record an animation using screen capture software.

I start off by creating the background or ‘skybox’, a 6-sided cube that will act as the horizon and sky in my environment. Here I’ve chopped up and used a NASA Milky Way panorama.

Afterwards, I quickly generate some test terrain to see how the skybox looks in a desert scene.

Not bad. I think I’ll keep the colours closer to the original though.

The terrain is OK, but I’m after more of an ‘infinite dunes’ look. I use WorldMachine, a generative, algorithmic terrain generation program to create a 'heightmap' and 'blendmap' that Unity can import as a terrain mesh.

I import it in to Unity to see how it looks, and add a sand-ripple texture to the dunes.

I'm happy with that. Now I want to create an object for the 'camera' to pan around, to keep the video short and sweet. I decide on a hovering boulder, made using a freely available Unity asset.

To spice up the boulder a little, I add a Phong Tesselation Shader, normal used to make objects appear smoother in games. I adjust the levels on the shader to an unnatural level to create a glitch effect as the boulder moves nearer or further from the camera. I add a script on the boulder to have it rotate in the air indefinitely, as well as an intense orange light in the middle of the boulder which doesnt rotate. This will create the effect of the light moving around the boulder from within.

I add the camera animation paths using a plugin. This will create the panning effect.

Lastly, I add some particle shader effects below the 'floor' to create the effect of dust blowing across the desert, as well as adding a soft area light near the floating boulder, so that the video isn't too dark.

I export the 'game', and open it, recording the loop using OBS free screen capture software. Afterwards I drag everything in to Adobe Premiere, and add an old unfinished song of mine as a 'soundtrack'.

In the next post, I’ll upload the finished product. Here is a test version without the audio track.

Please place goggles securely on face.

Exercise caution: Broken Interplanetary Transporter

Ok, so Digimon Tamagotchis are like $160 on eBay. Let’s shelf that idea until I find some investors.

Emily Tsai has done what I should do and gone and built her own using arduino.

She’s even put the code up on Github! Join my tamagotchi empire, Emily, we’ll turn every skyscraper lighting system in to a kawaii fighting machine.

Here’s a little something from my (sadly denied) application for Perth City’s Lighthouse program, an arts project aimed at taking over the LED lighting on Perth Council House to transform the building in to a giant Tamagotchi - ‘Council Housepet’.

Send me a message on facebook, let’s get this cat-eared ball rolling.

Generative art, in any and all forms, has been on my to-do list for a while, so I’m glad I got to look in to it a little more with this unit. I’ve got big data dreams, which is partly why I switched my major to Visualisation Technology. I’ve got big ideas, but my projector is only a budget portable.

Ryoji Ikeda, though, he’s got a big projector.

“maxresdefault.jpg” funny joke.

To me, working with data-streams on an audio-visual level is the stuff of dreams. ONEIROGRAPHICS, guys. There’s just something so ‘90s scifi about a sine wave in your peripherals and a sheet of unintelligible numerals raining down on you while you quantum-defrag the mainframe of your holotoaster, and I love every frantic millisecond of it.

A while ago I came across this video on the sound of sorting algorithms, a nice little 8-bit arpeggio. Makes me wish I could hear what Digimon tamagotchis yelled at each other when you forced them to fight in the playground.

Don’t steal my idea, I’m probably going to try and figure out how to make that one a reality...

I’d thought about the First. I’d thought about the Second (the lack of a consistent graphic theme puts me off), but I hadn’t given the Afterlife much thought. But I found it was quite nice to.

Let’s get some Ż̵̟̳̤̩̱̳̈ͯ̍ͥ͑́͞Ạ̠͕͚̗̭̬̯͈͓̦̦̯̭̣̙͚̳ͧͥ͒ͪͣ̂̉͋͆̾̀̾̅ͪ̄̉̓͡L̢͎̣̦̝̺͔̮͓̠ͫ̿ͣ̀ͅGͦ̅ͦͨ̾̄͏̷̻̺͔͙͚̘̪̺̝̣̪̟͉̦̪̲̀͘Ò̜̫͎̼̤͓̼ͯͧ͆͝͞ text on there too, thanks guy.

I remember the Neopets craze of ‘99, the Sunday Times had an article and I begged my parents for Dial-Up so I could create my own pet, what I didn’t know then was called an ‘avatar’. Humans are great and all, and I’m pretty comfortable with who I am, but I’m pretty comfortable being a 50 tonne giant bat-dinosaur playing a Frogger clone for fake dollars too, you know?

There’s some great work being down by the guys over at Convrge, a VR social app that allows users with virtual reality headsets to put on their cybersuits and be a floating whatever-you-want, and just hang out by the virtual campfire and have a chat.

http://www.convrge.co/

Ok, just a heads up, there’s gonna be some shameless self promotion below, because I’m a shameless Glitch Art fanatic.

I love it when my brother smashes his laptop screen on the floor and I get the remains, oozing liquid crystal but still processing away.

Or when the camera dies halfway through a panorama and you get a 3-legged monstrosity walking across your landscape.

When I die I want my ashes opened in notepad and saved as a JPG.

R.I.P. you handsome representation of a face. Pixel Sorted Self-Portrait.

Death of a Nebula, Notepad Glitch.

https://soundcloud.com/oneirophonics - Clearing EP Cover Art, Pixel Sorting.

oneirophonics - Do Maddy’s Dream of Electric Synth?, Cover Art, HEX Edited

Bonsai on Bedspread, 3D Photogrammetric scan with insufficient data.

shmit.png, Reckless data-moshing - smack your HDD during New Girl.

When I first started experimenting with and creating glitch art, I thought it was cheating, that I wasn’t being original. The software, and code, it did all the work for me. Nowadays, it’s even worse - there are iPhone apps that make the software do the work for you. Luckily someone summed up my feelings for me.

http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/blog/glitch-art-is-dead

“ ...still plenty of space to explore when it comes to the beauty of brokenness.“

Ah, the archive. I owe it so much, but give back to it so little. Well, willingly at least.

Without the repository of open archives that is the Internet I doubt I would be pursuing my artistic practice at all. I’m just too shit at drawing.

But the archives make me lazy, too. I’ve got the data sitting there waiting for me to use, so I don’t go out and do anything with it. I’m too tired. I’ll do it later. One day the building the Internet lives in will burn down, and I’ll make a self-portrait of my sad face with the charcoal. I’m just too shit at sculptures.

An artist in the readings that stood out to me was Isabel Lofgren (umlaut redacted), particularly her photographic series ‘Fragile Connections – Fragments of a Lover’s Discourse’. Perhaps a personal connection for me, as I know the pain of trying to make out another person’s face in the dark, rather than make-out with their face in the dark.

http://www.isabellofgren.com/?projects=fragile-connections-2

“2006-2007 (as long as the love story lasted)”

‘Satellite’

Final GIF Image for CIC 2015 Sem2

This proved to be the most difficult part of the entire project - merging two GIF images in to one. The trick, in the end, was making sure both GIF images had the same amount of frames, and the layer overlay was set to ‘Exclusion’, before pasting all of the ‘Satellite’ frames over the ‘Earth’ frames...

After a bit of tidy-up, I changed the hue & saturation settings of the combined image to give the earth a bit of purple coloring.

Looks good! Ready for final GIF compression...

File size nice and low.

Finished product to come in the next post.

In the end, the finished GIF image doesn’t loop as well as I’d have liked it to - next time I will pay more attention to finding a natural loop within the video frames, rather than assuming it could be fixed up in Photoshop... I tried 20 types of tweening with no luck for about an hour.

Still, I’m happy with the way it came out overall, especially the fact that I managed to combine a high resolution video with a high resolution photo and keep the whole thing under 1mb.

I searched for and found some NASA in-orbit footage on Youtube and downloaded it, hoping to extract some frames to use as the rotating planet beneath my hovering satellite...

I grabbed around 31 frames near the end of the clip where only the Earth’s rotation was visible...

Testing how recognisable the video would be after GIF compression/resizing settings...

Happy with my settings, I set up my final ‘canvas’ by creating an area of empty ‘space’ above the rotating Earth (by editing the canvas of the Earth GIF image in Photoshop)...

Notice the interesting Pattern Diffusion effects when zooming in and out.

I started off by seperating the satellite from the background with the polygon tool. I cut it out, cleaned up some stars, and made a simple animation of the satellite layer bobbing up and down .

Having previously experimented in class with resizing images to force them in to a lower resolution, I tried to reproduce the effect on the satellite photograph with varying settings.

The Adaptive Diffusion created a nice ‘melting’ effect on the bobbing animation, so I decided to stick with that. Pattern Diffusion looked nice but didn’t reproduce the melt.

Adaptive Diffusion:

Pattern Diffusion:

I wanted to stick with a 4 colour palette to keep the filesize low and keep it looking as old-school pixel-art as possible.

Changed hue & saturation settings:

The next posts will outline my GIF project. Please refer to previous image posts as inspiration.

After playing around with a high resolution image of a satellite in class: