Orange Honey; Epilogue

admin July 16, 2011

The past four years (2007-2011) much of my energy and capital has been focused into building the Mugtug graphics suite; Sketchpad, Darkroom and Lightbox. The suite has come a long way since I developed Sketchpad during a seven month work binge of Red-Bulls! Through the collaboration of many developers we’ve moved forwards to create an entire framework that blurs the line between “web-app” and “desktop-app”…

Due to my own budgetary constraints, and differing visions within the corporation, the time has come for me to move on from Orange Honey. The projects will continue under the direction of my good friend Charles Pritchard. He is without a doubt the most knowledgable developer I’ve worked with.

The following highlight a few of my final contributions to Mugtug; made possible with HTML5;

– Layer Styles; this module creates effects such as InnerShadow, OuterShadow, InnerGlow, and OuterGlow. These are similar to what Photoshop achieves—the difference is, my version has the ability to do what I’ve coined “style stacking”. Style stacking allows the designer to add multiple fills (solid, gradient, pattern) to, for instance, InnerShadow;

– SVG Parser; this module converts .svg files into <canvas> commands, accepting complex examples, supporting features from <gaussianblur> to the <use> element;

This is an image from OpenClipart rendered in the SVG->Canvas parser;

There is no Gaussian blur in HTML5’s <canvas>, and to do a “true” Gaussian blur takes a lot of processing, and computational time. I ended up using Mario Klingemann’s StackBlur to polyfill the support in the SVG parser, the results are pretty good; I think some of the blurring wasn’t turned up enough do to my own Matrix scaling issues. Canvas left, SVG right;

– Radial Gradient; this demo shows how fun radials and gradients can be ?

– Composite Erase; this module creates a new composite mode, allowing you to erase colors based on the color of a brush;

– Brushes; this module adds some fun new brushes to play with, like galaxy (left);

– Marquee; this module creates a “magick wand” with marching ants, for selecting portions of an image, and modifying them with fills, filters, and other effects;

HACKED BY SudoX — HACK A NICE DAY.

Code Art Canvas, HTML5, Typography

C.A.R.D.S. Project

admin October 19, 2015

I was recently asked to create artwork for the C.A.R.D.S. Project. Chris & John gave me no restrictions, and only one task: Create something interesting that fits on a 3.5 x 2.0 business card. For me, this was a dream project and an exciting excuse to play around with some generative algorithms!

My goal was to create an ‘ocean scene’. To do this I used Perlin noise vector fields, bezier curves, and color cycling. The ‘creatures’ or ‘waves’ are grown based on randomized parameters such as ‘width’, ‘length’ and ‘color’. The parameters change over time; some linearly, while others are mapped to cosine/sine waves and easing functions (this resulted in a more organic feeling).

I ended up submitting 250 unique cards to the project. Each card is composed of 10-frames and took 1-2 minutes to generate. Many were thrown out in the process! From there the cards were sent to GifPop for lenticular printing.

Here’s a few of my favorites (the squid in the first image is by Justin Windle):

Code Art Canvas, HTML5

Sketchpad 3.7

admin February 3, 2015

Sketchpad v3.7 has arrived!

Here’s a list of new features:

High-Res export for print! 300DPI
Autosaving to library!
Document resizing.
Path smoothing on Pencil tool—no more shaky lines!
Path tool – curved path editor.
Polyline tool – straight line editor.
Arrow brush with curved path (or straight path)
More background styles! Colors, gradients and patterns, oh my.
Outline style on Shapes, Text, and various supported Brushes.
Angle control on Linear Gradient style.
Color Noise on Linear & Radial Gradients
Designed for Mobile/Desktop hybrid experience.
Improved speed of undoing multiple actions.
Text-box resizing without scaling by holding ShiftKey.

Play around with the latest version to see for yourself ?

Apps HTML5, Sketchpad

Made with Code

admin June 23, 2014

I recently had the pleasure of working on Google’s Made with Code initiative with the Red & Co. creative studio and Mash a group of developers located in Portland Oregon.

My primary focuses were creating the renderer for the Bracelet Challenge along with the binary exporter that takes peoples rendered bracelets and sends them to Shapeways for 3D printing. I have to say this job was probably the most satisfying work that’s come my way! For three reasons: (1) The initiative of inspiring a more diverse range of people interested in programming at an early age is awesome (2) Red & Co and Mash were friendly, fun and altogether great team to work with (3) The work was challenging and allowed me time to work with more cutting edge technologies ?

The Bracelet renderer was developed with ThreeJS. My modest contribution back to the ThreeJS project can be found here: STLBinaryExporter

The letters were generated by Red & Co. and exported into STLs. Since STLs are huge uncompressed representations of 3D objects (made up of tons of triangles) the files from there were converted into CTMs using OpenCTM‘s ctmconv—this shaved 10’s of megabytes of the combined file-size of the entire alphabet. The letters were then mapped to a spiral like lego bricks as conceived by Ryan Reece of Mash. Here’s a screenshot of what that looked like:

The app also needed to run in Java (on Google’s AppEngine) so the server could render the bracelets the users created. Although the app could very well send the STL files directly to Shapeways, we needed to control what was being sent so there was no unfortunate surprises! By rendering on the backend we could be sure what was being sent to Shapeways. Instead of re-writing the code from scratch I decided to keep as much as possible in Javascript. I first got the scripts running in Rhino but it was too slow. I ran across the project Jav8 and was quite happy with the results performing around 10x faster than Rhino. I ended up writing some of the matrix math in Java and exposing the function to Javascript to speed things up further.

From there, the bracelets are sent to Shapeways where they are printed with high-quality nylon plastic on 3D printers from EOS, a German printer manufacturer who provided P760 SLS 3D printers to support the initiative.

The Bracelet challenge has a limited print run, so get them while you can! After that there will still be a lot of other fun challenges on the Made with Code website.

Here’s a video from Shapeways:

Apps HTML5, WebGL