Diamonds Are Forever
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It’s been a couple weeks since I’ve shown anything in ICM because it’s been been a long, ongoing series of troubleshooting, learning, struggling, and figuring it out. As much as it could have been easy (and equally educational) to come up with assignments for the sake of it, such as with the Duck Hunt game, I wanted to try and begin pushing into work that I really wanted to create. Daniel Rozin has been such a great instructor–he teaches with a lot of humor and thoughtfulness; there is even a kind poignancy to his lectures when he describes Processing. Really! And in recent weeks he has encouraged us to move toward refining our ideas and building the work that we want to make and envision, not just doing the exercises. As I was struggling though the code, I also had a random conversation with another student and I was explaining that I felt like I spent hours and days trying to tackle a problem on my own through research and trial-and-error, and felt like it was cheating whenever I turned to the Residents or faculty to tell me the answer. She instead pointed out “hey, you’re paying a lot of money to be here [at ITP]–take advantage of the resources here” and she’s right: I can try to get so far by teaching myself but I am here to be taught by the people who know much, much more than me. And it’s definitely been more useful and more rewarding to get that help than to just be roadblocked by issue after issue. At least then I have the solution to go over and understand better, and someone to help guide my problem-solving approaches. This has been a very long-winded way of saying that I’m grateful for the advice I’ve had from many sources at ITP, and here’s what they’ve been helping me with. VISION To create a raining cascade of diamond like objects; secondly, to map them into 3D with video texture! So that it would appear like a reflection in faceted crystal. THE WORK First I imagined creating a central point, with random points of a certain distance around, then connecting all those points with line. It is a 2D sketch pretending that it is 3D. See Processing Code: For some reason, this doesn’t render in Javascript VERSION 02 Once I started to add live video as a texture, things started to look wonky. Because Processing doesn’t know what order in which to connect the lines to create a whole shape, I got something that looked more like shards of glass or like broken bits of rock. See Processing Code: If you want to use this, must download or copy-paste into Processing and run locally, because of live video feed. VERSION 03 This latest version tackles the 3D challenge. Good thing there’s a nice online tutorial about polygons! Not to say it still wasn’t loopy trying to think about that added dimension. Download code for this and prior iteration
Here it is! The final thing!! Mapping turned out to be an easy correction. Still looks strange but I think this is as normal as 2D video mapped to 3D faceted object can look. I ended up making the diamond and playback screen bigger, to show more of the image in the video. |