Here’s a prototype I worked on several months back that explores the idea of what happens when you run the HYPE Framework (http://www.hypeframework.org/) as a plug-in w/in Illustrator CS5 and you add a little additional magic to it…
…spoiler alert… the magic is defined below….
HYPE + Flash Media Server (courtesy of Influxis: http://www.influxis.com/) allows multiple users to be connected to the same creative environment remotely. Users can access and collaboratively interact with the same content using a variety of different access points: from different computers running the plug-in in Illustrator; as a separate desktop application (where a designer might not have Illustrator installed on a particular computer); and / or via a browser. Once a design is mutually agreed upon, the design can be committed to Illustrator by clicking the make magic button.
To make the Flash plug-in talk directly to Illustrator CS5, I used Adobe’s new / revamped magic which is now called the Creative Suite SDK (http://www.adobe.com/devnet/creativesuite/sdk/), which replaces Adobe’s PatchPanel.
In 2006, it was tricky to become immersed in video online because it had a difficult time – due to technological limitations – playing smooth without frame dropouts and artifacts. As I work around, I decided to merge the best of After Effects and Flash together to get that immersive experience by writing some code to connect the dots between the two. After an enlightening conversation with Chris Prosser from the After Effects team, I wrote a script for After Effects and a Flash Component called After Effects 2 Flash: Transform Properties. The former exports keyframe data out of After Effects as an XML file and the latter allows the Flash developer to import the XML data into Flash and in order to replicate the Transform Properties in Flash without having to manually recreate all of the keyframes in Flash. When a person experiences the SWF, the XML data is loaded and the motions are precisely synchronized to the keyframe data. On a side note, there’s a clever hack that enables you to export Motion Tracking data as well.
So I received a paypal email notification recently that a gentleman, Alex Tarrant, purchased the plug-in and – to make a long story short – he told me to take a peak at Snoop420 on Tuesday, 4/20.
I love it. I would have never, ever imagined the code could take on a life of its own with a branch ending up as a small contribution to the great execution of code, design and video on Snoop’s site.
The point in all of this is that… once you release your code / plug-ins / applications into the world wild web – whether it’s for a commercial product or, especially if it’s open-source – you lose complete control over how it will be used. As long as it’s unmalicious or does not cause one to be unhappy, when these seeds bloom, they’re beautiful.
GPH GALLERY . UNM SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE + PLANNING
March 26 - April 16
Artists included: Dr. Rachel Armstrong, Derrick Ballard, Julia Barbosa, Richard Esterie, Kenji Kondo, Dr. Evan Malone, Karole Mazeika, Katie Rast (Fab/Lab:SD), Michael Silver, Shimwolf, Sam Sterling, Luke Stribling, Mira Woodson + Dr. Woohoo!
RIDE, RISE, ROAR is a David Byrne concert film directed by David Hillman Curtis that blends riveting onstage performances with intimate details of the creative collaborations that make the music and show happen.
Shot with multiple cameras over several concerts during the 08/09 tour, the film blends the energy and charisma of classic Talking Heads with the heartfelt pathos of David Byrne and Brian Eno’s most recent collaboration.
Between the 14 live songs, the film achieves an unprecedented intimacy with David Byrne and the band, documenting behind-the-scenes auditions, rehearsals, and interviews with key players while revealing the creative process that led to the show’s unique fusion of pop music and modern dance.
RIDE, RISE, ROAR celebrates Byrne’s extensive career as a musician and testifies to the creativity that keeps him going today.
The hyper-talented Lee Brimelow and MNR show-n-tell different plug-ins from the present and future of plug-in development for the Creative Suite @ MAX 2009. This is a great video for Flash / Flex developers as well as a primer for designers to see what is possible when you connect-the-dots between code your favorite CS applications.
Continuing on my quest to rid the world of ugly color palettes, I have created a couple of new color palette options – leveraging Adobe Illustrator’s color tools, Kuler and In The Mod: Color Analytic applications – for openFrameworks (OF) and vvvv artists/developers. The incredibly talented defetto (check out his new site at abstractbirds.com) helped push me and developed the vvvv Patches and I received excellent beta testing support from vadim.
There are two types of colors tools that I will share with you: 1) Scripts that run within Illustrator and 2) several stand-alone applications, both of which export the color palettes as XML files in a format that’s compatible with OF and vvvv.
Kuler > Illustrator CS4 > openFrameworks Illustrator has some incredible tools for editing color palettes as individuals or in groups. Simply create a color group, drop some color swatches in that group and double click it to explore all of your editing options (and/or check out Adobe’s online help for editing colors here). What most people may not realize is that via an ExtendScript – Adobe’s enhanced version of Javascript – can automatically determine how many colors and groups there are in a Swatches Panel and then make additions, changes, deletions or simply retrieve more information about each swatch, e.g., what the RGB values are of each swatch. Combined with the ability to read and write files, we can easily import and export colors to / from whatever formats we want. Unfortunately if we tried this in Photoshop, we would fail because our script wouldn’t be able to tell us how many swatches we have due to self-imposed limitations from Adobe [ I love you guys but come on, I've begged for this for how many years? ].
In the following video, I will walk you through the process of installing the ExtendScript, selecting a group of colors from the Kuler extension in Illlustrator, exporting them and importing them into openFrameworks.
This tutorial was built on a Mac using Adobe Illustrator CS4, Xcode and the fat version of openFrameworks v006 with the following addons (ofxTuio, ofxMSAFluid, ofxMSAInteractiveObject, ofxXmlSettings and ofxSimpleGuiToo).
1. ofxMSAFluid
for the kuler > AI > OF integration, as i mentioned previously, i’m using memo’s sweet ofxMSAFluid. the first thing you’ll want to do is follow memo’s instructions on downloading the OF addons for ofxMSAFluid here: memo.tv/ofxmsafluid. once you can build and run that project proceed to the next step.
3. after completing steps 1 + 2, watch the video again if need be… the script + OF code will make more sense at that point.
Kuler > Adobe Illustrator CS4 > vvvv For vvvv lovers, download the script that I wrote and vvvv Patches via defetto from here and follow the same process as described in the video up to ~4:30. Further instructions can be found in the download in the ReadMe-Kuler 2 vvvv.pdf.
ITM: Your Images and ITM: Webcam > openFrameworks As previously mentioned, the second set of color tools for openFrameworks involves twostand-alone applications. The first, In The Mod: Your Images allows you to drag-n-drop images from your computer onto the application which then extrapolates the colors, analyzes and visualizes them and enables you to save then either directly to Illustrator or Photoshop or as XML files for Processing, openFrameworks or vvvv. In The Mod: Webcam supports the color functionality, however it lets you quickly capture colors via the video streaming in from your Webcam.
How do you save the colors from ITM: Your Images or ITM: Webcam to use in vvvv? After selecting a palette, click on the vvvv icon (it’s black with white copy and says ‘vvvv’ on it), fifth to the left in the bottom-right corner of the application. A save dialog window will open. Select the location you would like to save it.
How do you import the colors into vvvv? To import the XML color palette (as an xml file that includes the following variables: red, green, blue, frequency, relative frequency, and cumulative relative frequency) into vvvv you will need the following:
1) The latest version of vvvv
2) Download the vvvv Patches from here. Read the file ReadMe-In The Mod 2 vvvv.pdf for step-by-step instructions. As a bonus, there is an Illustrator script and set of instructions (ReadMe-Kuler 2 vvvv.pdf) on how to export color palettes directly from Illustrator.
Here’s a new HYPE video sneak peek from Dr. Woohoo.
When a great team of people start rallying behind a great concept… you get “make magic” buttons.
Then when you start talking about “multi-user” art creation and the ability for each participant to render the current state of the work in real time in illustrator… the future is looking really sexy.
Especially when it comes to this idea of editions. Editions has always existed as a duplicate of an original… an original that never changes. This presents a great opportunity to create editions… of a current state of an original that is ALWAYS changing… and modified by the public.
Genetic Architectures vol II explores, through theory and practice, how algorithms can sculpt architecture coming from the perspective at ESARQ - UIC (Universitat Internacional de Catalunya) Barcelona. This is not a book where the code is exposed, unfortunately, however with articles from Alberto T. Estavez, Evan Douglis, Francois Roche and the well-thought out and eloquent prose of Karl Chu, I highly recommend it for any artist using code to generate their artwork and who is interested in knowing more about what magic is possible. Here are two ( GenCity | The Floral Obsession | Christina Cogdell’s lecture Metaphor, Ideology, or Process? | Digital-Botanic Architecture II the latest book by Dennis Dollens, the editor of Genetic Architectures vol I, which includes a free pdf version and a lot of Rhino work ) accompanying websites that I think you will enjoy.
After reading the article by Douglis in Genetic Architectures vol II, I was thrilled when I found this new book by him. Beyond the somewhat redundant articles complimenting his contributions and innovative approach to teaching and pushing the boundaries, I found the descriptions and imagery to be the most satisfying. I was also surprised at how many times Processing was referred to. I would have rather seen less descriptions about Douglis and more examples of the actual Processing + Rhino code the articles so often referred to.
Kostas connects the dots between the concepts of modern computational theories that embrace algorithms in what he refers to as algotecture, a precise and extremely detailed exploration into the language of and the code (Maya’s MEL scripts) used to generate said algotecture. It is a fascinating and ambitious attempt to contextualize the evolution of design in architecture, engineering and art that’s worthy of comparison to Karl Chu’s article in Genetic Architectures vol II. I only wish he had included more code for the sections on (Syn) biosis, Periplocus (Complexity) and Stochastic search. For at least some papers relating to this subject matter, you might want to refer to BioThings’s Alisa Andrasek’s list of references found here.
There is one correction I would like to make in relation to the following excerpt from the book:
‘Corporate architectural practices, such as SOM, NBBJ, or RTKL, use the computer simply as an efficiency tool while continuing to develop design through traditional manual means, and prominent avant-garde practices, such as Gehry, Morphosis, or Zaha Hadid, use the computer as a means of marketing and presentation, despite their unsubstantiated claims to the opposite. Occasionally, there are some young architects fresh out of school who may be able to use computational methods in design. Yet the majority of architecture practices, despite their appearance, are still developing ideas through their own human minds or by simplistic NURBS-based formal mongering.’
I have personally seen the computational design work created at Zaha’s firm and they have a firm grasp of using code to hijack and sculpt their commercial tools of choice. One needs to look no further than the work from Shajay who works in the Code | Design group at ZH. To be fair, this book was published in 2006, so it’s possible things were different at that point in time.
On a side note, Kostas was generous enough to provide us with the following pdf that explores + provides the code behind generating a 3d Fractal (L-Systems) in Maya using MEL:
On a path from Ernst Haeckel’s Art Forms of Nature to Janine Benyous’s talk on Biomimicry in action @ TED, I found cradle to cradle. C2C grabs you from the first page and pulls you into your living room to view the world from the eyes of an Architect and Chemist, McDonough and Braungart, respectively. Examining what chemicals are used and how they effect us, we travel from our living room to the structure of the house and outward through a journey that every person creating objects - from the designer, artist and architect - should read. The best part of C2C is when it looks to nature for inspiration in regards to how to build and not just minimize our negative effect on the world, but how to create and contribute with a positive end result.
Here’s a video of a talk that Bill McDonough gave at Bioneers 2000. The value of the 45 minutes it takes to watch this will pay for itself over and over again. It’s simply that good and that important.
——
After finding so much wonderful material on Architecture + Code, it begs the question, are there well-thought out books on Hybrid arts as well?
].
Recent Comments