Filed under: Animation
So as of now we have:
Grass and butterflies that react to the prescence of people. They will accept 5/6 (how many position co-ords are you sending me?) people’s positions and the grass parts for them, and the butterflies scatter.
Based on the overall health, their saturation fades, and the butterflies’ population is decimated.
The tree(s) wilt and then the leaves fall off, based on the local health (which is based on how people have been behaving in the zone directly around it)
Still to do : the face leaves.
the idea where we take pictures of people as they enter and have their faces printed on certain leaves – so the difficulty lies in that the trees are prerendered for maximum visual goodness, but it means i can’t retexture them. So I have realtime cards with faces, however – how to integrate them into the prerendered trees? hmmmm
I’ve worked out a way of determining the health of the eco-system by referencing peoples proximity to it. The area across the front of the gallery closest to the system is divided into 6 boxes and when a person stands in any given box for longer than say 30 seconds it starts to degrade the health of the nearest tree. Once the nearest tree has reached a critical level (ie it’s dead) and they is still in that box the surrounding trees will start to degrade. Alternately people can reverse the effects once they moved away from the eco-system, the speed at which the health is restored is also scaled depending on the person’s proximity to the eco-system. Each of the boxes is linked to a universal timer, therefore allowing for multiple people to affect the same area. When many people stand together in an area they act as multipliers for each other, degrading the system even faster. Complicatedness level 5 so far.
Filed under: Animation
Booya, I’ve worked out a way to get dynamically cloth simulated objects into my realtime engine and index the animation.
Noice
So the trick for anyone who is interest i, using Maya 8.5’s nCloth system, we create our falling leaf animation, the process of which is well documented here. Now all well and good but how do we get that information to a realtime engine? It would be prohibitive to cache out hundreds or thousands of geometry snapshots as per a blendshape /morph target solution.
But what we can do, is using a follicle node in Maya, we can find out the translate and rotate information of each polygon making up the leaf. Its quite simple so 2 will suffice, we write out the T and R information to a channel and read that into our realtime application – Touch Designer, where we use that information to drive a duplicate leaf object. Now its a bit rough looking so we simply smooth that shape. Voila high resolution dynamically simulated leaf for very little computational overhead.
To be able to ‘play’ the animation and control the speed, we simply use a lookup table and index the animation against our, urrr, index.
Filed under: Thoughts
For someone with a performance background, I have a pathological fear that when I go to a show, some chucklehead is going to drag me up on stage for some ritual humiliation. I hate it.
However, I do think that presence and variability is a potent force in performance and art. So with Extirpation we are making a very real and direction connection between the audience and the work – there is no choice, by commission or omission, they will have an effect on the piece. We are also going to capture everyones face as they enter and intergrate their image onto the leaves of the trees so again,by the simple act of entering the space the audience member is implicit in the piece, and their presence will directly affect their own viability in the work
Filed under: Animation
Butterfly module Completed. (1.7mb quicktime)
Using the information derived from Adam’s tracking system, these little guys are reactive to the movements of people close to the projection, as people approach, they will scatter. They are also a reactive population, in that their numbers and vibrancy will wax and wane as the health of the whole system is affected by the human element.
Filed under: Max/MSP/Jitter
Gathering statistical data about the participants during the installation is integral determining the overall health of the system. One way of gathering a direct and meaningful data in a non intrusive way is through people (blob) tracking. From blob (x,y) data we can derive a whole host of other more complex relationships between these blobs and the eco-system. I’ve used the OpenCV library for max/msp to track the participants movements in the gallery. At the moment the smaller video window is used simply clicked at any point to initialise tracking of an object but I plan to create automated initialisation attached to a coin-op. Here’s the text version of the Max patch opticalflow.pat
Filed under: Animation
The thought process behind this work started over two years ago up in Brisbane after a few wines with my friend Tanya Mason. I was, and still am very much interested in generative systems, and was dead set on creating a complex set of L-system trees for this piece. (lindenmayer systems, an algorithmic method of iteratively and generationally creating complex forms)
However I’m being swayed somewhat, and have all but abandoned this approach, not due to its inherent coolness, which is, super nifty, but because aesthetically I can’t quite achieve the same beauty that I can using other methods, namely multiple layers of rendered sprites.
Compare:
I’m currently playing with a slightly ‘painterly’ look which doens’t make for great stills but works beautifully in motion, giving it a slight shimmer.
Filed under: Thoughts
Reading David Suzuki’s ‘The Sacred Balance’ I came across a great quote which sums up much better than what I can, what we’re trying to say with this work.
“The components of the natural world are myriad but they constitute a single living system. There is no escape from our interdependence with nature; we are woven into the closest relationship with the Earth, the sea, the air, the seasons, the animals and all the fruits of the Earth. What affects one affects all – we are part of a greater whole – the body of the planet. We must respect, preserve, and love its manifold expression if we hope to survive” – Bernard Campbell, Human Ecology
