Category: art
Retro grain with Blender EEVEE
Blender 2.8 is in beta for a while so it’s about time for me to catch up and to get to know the new renderer EEVEE. I started tonight with a simple grain shader which gives the impression of a dot art style. It’s a pretty simple node setup, in general it’s like a toon shader but with the power of an additional voronoi texture. It’s really impressive to see these huge steps made in the latest development of blender but this will be a topic for it’s own in another post. For a tutorial on this shader check out this video!
Cellular automata in Processing
I am experimenting with cellular automata behaviours in Processing…computation took some time so this is just a quick time-lapse recording made with my iPhone rather than exporting single frames and converting them to hight quality video.
Cell[][] _cellArray; int _cellSize = 2; int _numX, _numY; void setup() { size(256, 256); _numX = floor(width/_cellSize); _numY = floor(height/_cellSize); frameRate(60); strokeWeight(0); restart(); } void restart() { _cellArray = new Cell[_numX][_numY]; for (int x = 0; x < _numX; x++) { for (int y = 0; y < _numY; y++) { Cell newCell = new Cell(x, y); _cellArray[x][y] = newCell; } } for (int x = 0; x < _numX; x++) { for (int y = 0; y < _numY; y++) { int above = y-1; int below = y+1; int left = x-1; int right = x+1; if (above < 0) above = _numY-1; if (below == _numY) below = 0; if (left < 0) left = _numX-1; if (right == _numX) right = 0; _cellArray[x][y].addNeighbor(_cellArray[left][above]); _cellArray[x][y].addNeighbor(_cellArray[left][y]); _cellArray[x][y].addNeighbor(_cellArray[left][below]); _cellArray[x][y].addNeighbor(_cellArray[x][above]); _cellArray[x][y].addNeighbor(_cellArray[x][below]); _cellArray[x][y].addNeighbor(_cellArray[right][above]); _cellArray[x][y].addNeighbor(_cellArray[right][y]); _cellArray[x][y].addNeighbor(_cellArray[right][below]); } } } void draw() { //if (millis() % 5 == 0) // restart(); background(200); for (int x = 0; x < _numX; x++) { for (int y = 0; y < _numY; y++) { _cellArray[x][y].calcNextState(); } } translate(_cellSize/2, _cellSize/2); for (int x = 0; x < _numX; x++) { for (int y = 0; y < _numY; y++) { _cellArray[x][y].drawMe(); } } } //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// class Cell { float x, y; float state; float nextState; float lastState = 0; Cell[] neighbors; Cell(float ex, float why) { x = ex * _cellSize; y = why * _cellSize; nextState = ((x/500) + (y/300)) * 14; state = nextState; neighbors = new Cell[0]; } void addNeighbor(Cell cell) { neighbors = (Cell[])append(neighbors, cell); } void calcNextState() { float total = 0; for (int i = 0; i < neighbors.length; i++) total += neighbors[i].state; float average = int(total/8); if (average == 255) nextState = 0; else if (average == 0) nextState = 255; else { nextState = state + average; if (lastState > 0) nextState -= lastState; if (nextState > 255) nextState = 255; else if (nextState < 0) nextState = 0; } lastState = state; } void drawMe() { state = nextState; fill(state); rect(x,y,_cellSize, _cellSize); } }
Sketching exercise – lines & shading
Cheat sheet for Paper by Fifty Three
My challenge for 2015 – One sketch a day!
I suck at drawing. Really, it’s that bad. You could give a pencil to a two year old and get more out of it as I would. I wanted to draw better for so many years but never really started to improve something. So why not try it by setting a personal challenge for the new year? I think that’s a good idea to motivate myself to finally improve my drawing skills (at least a bit). There is no certain goal for this challenge, I hope my abilities to draw what I see (or think of) will improve by a huge amount if I just draw…So I did not set any specific rules, except one: draw one sketch a day, regardless how!
In the moment I think most of the sketches will be done on iPad with one of my favorite drawing apps: Paper or ProCreate. Check them out if you don’t know them, these are brilliant pieces of software! I will post every image on my blog with slight edits in Pixelmator at max. Since the year is already some days old I will try to catch up some sketches, if I don’t get it the challenge will last as long as I’ve got 365 unique sketches.
Okay, now let the sketching begin!