Creating Personality w/ Math, Visions of Destruction, and Blender with Voice

#085 Creative Coding / Generative Arts Weekly

In his creative work the artist is dependent on sources and resources deriving from the spiritual unconscious. - Viktor E. Frankl

Happy Holidays! I hope you all are enjoying the people around you.

Part of my holiday fun was plot for a number of friends and I want to give you the ability to use the same and find a snowflake that you like by going to the site below.

Generative Snowflakes

A few of my favorite are above. Just use the create snowflake button to generate outputs. If you like them, just download the SVG and you can do whatever with it. Fun tip… take it into Inkscape or Illustrator and you can have fun tranforming the paths.

Hope you have the best of holidays!

Chris Ried

Tutorials & Articles

Giving Personality to Procedural Animation using Math

It's been a while since the last video hasn't it? I've made quite a bit of progress since the last update, and since one of the things I worked on was some procedurally animated characters, I decided to make a video about the subject. In particular, this video highlights the entire process from initial motivation, to the technical design, technical analysis, and game design considerations.

This is fun way to take movement and bring life to it. It’s a great lesson to really take in and some of the teaching tools were created using Manim which is a great teaching tool.

Visions of Destruction: Exploring a Potential of Generative AI in Interactive Art

This paper explores the potential of generative AI within interactive art, employing a practice-based research approach. It presents the interactive artwork ”Visions of Destruction” as a detailed case study, highlighting its innovative use of generative AI to create a dynamic, audience-responsive experience. This artwork applies gaze-based interaction to dynamically alter digital landscapes, symbolizing the impact of human activities on the environment by generating contemporary collages created with AI, trained on data about human damage to nature, and guided by audience interaction. The transformation of pristine natural scenes into human-made and industrialized landscapes through viewer interaction serves as a stark reminder of environmental degradation. The paper thoroughly explores the technical challenges and artistic innovations involved in creating such an interactive art installation, emphasizing the potential of generative AI to revolutionize artistic expression, audience engagement, and especially the opportunities for the interactive art field. It offers insights into the conceptual framework behind the artwork, aiming to evoke a deeper understanding and reflection on the Anthropocene era and human-induced climate change. This study contributes significantly to the field of creative AI and interactive art, blending technology and environmental consciousness in a compelling, thought-provoking manner.

As far as it goes, generative AI is the emergence of a new form of creating. Some of it is exciting and perhaps one might be worried about further implications. The following paper is an interesting use case on creating installation art and using generative AI to extrapolate alternative outcomes and universes. It’s worth a look at.

Marcin Ignac - Variable Design

At Variable.io we design and develop data-driven artworks and generative branding systems that constantly change. How do you balance staying accurate to the data and brand story whilst maintaining artistic freedom? In this talk, you will learn about Variable’s approach, the power of constraints in design, the importance of building your own tools, and when to let algorithms roam free in search for the true shape of data.

Marcin Ignac (creator of Nodes) talks about his tools and the spectrum between data visualization and generative art.

Creative Coding for Geometric Art

I recently designed and coded a generative geometric art program that has surpassed my initial expectations as to the nature and variety of the abstract geometric art I would be able to create when using it. I'd like to share with you this adventure in creative coding and the evolution of this generative art program. To that end, this article is written primarily for those who have an interest in the creative coding aspects of generative art and my own software development process.

Understanding Godot Light Shaders and Light Calculations by Implementing a Toon Light Shader

In Introduction to Shaders, we discussed the two most common shader types: Vertex and Fragment. Godot offers another function to override: the Light shader. In this tutorial, we’ll see what we can do with this shader. To do so, we’ll have to look into how light is generally calculated in real-time 3D environments, how to implement this ourselves, and how to make changes to it to get a toon shader with uniform colors and hard edges.

Just a way to use both shaders in game development using Godot.

Controlling Blender with Voice using LLM

Experimenting with Googles' new Gemini 2.0 Flash Experimental to control Blender with my voice!

This showcases the innovative use of tools like LLMs (Large Language Models) to create intuitive and creative user interfaces. Leveraging these tools allows us to explore novel ways to interact with software, such as voice-controlled operations in Blender. This approach highlights the potential for enhancing user engagement by making tools more accessible and adaptable. Understanding and implementing such integrations can offer exciting opportunities for developers and creatives alike to push the boundaries of technology-driven interactions.

SplashSurf: Surface Reconstruction Library

splashsurf is a tool to reconstruct surfaces meshes from SPH particle data. The first image shows the visualization of a set of particles from an SPH fluid simulation from SPlisHSPlasH. The particle radius is 0.025. As the rendering of a fluid should not look like a ball pit, a surface mesh has to be reconstructed from this particle data. The next image shows a reconstructed surface mesh of the fluid produced by splashsurf with a "smoothing length" of 2.2 times the particles radius and a cell size of 1.1 times the particle radius.

The reconstruction library is written in Rust and it got me just interested in looking further into the information.

Books

Generative Art with JavaScript and SVG (2024)

A caveat before we begin: generative art, and creative coding more generally, can become an all-consuming addiction. “Just one more iteration” is a refrain you might hear from those unfortunate artists caught in its thrall. Creatives craving that next generative hit mixed with just the right amount of randomness.

The purpose of this book is to deal out this computational devilry in small doses, in a clear, logical fashion, so you can approach this topic safely and with your sanity intact. We will encounter organic forms borne of mechanical precision, unpredictable swathes of color cover our screens, lines and shapes flocking together in impossible harmony, and see complex structures emerge from simple rules. This is the essence of generative art, where not all is in your control.

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