Print-ready graphics in Canvas

admin November 9, 2011

Last month, I posted about the possibility of creating high-resolution and print-ready graphics in <canvas>. Since then, it’s been in the back of my mind, but happened to be at Kinko’s today, and decided to take this experiment to the next level… ?

The following flash-cards were designed in Illustrator [by Altered Focus], exported into SVG, then parsed into <canvas>… and finally, that one template card (in the picture below it’s the “C” major card on the left) was used to create a large variety of combinations—based on a set of music-theory instructions. Such as;

Chord = { // definition for an A chord
	e1: false,
	a: { 0: true },
	d: { 2: 1 },
	g: { 2: 2 },
	b: { 2: 3 },
	e2: { 0: true }
}

The best thing is; the designer can change the design in Illustrator and the design is automatically updated on the front-end, the programmer doesn’t even notice. I’m telling you, Illustrator is one bad-ass HTML5 editor ?

There are a few bugs in my music-theory code (please excuse the improper fingering positions!), but, as you can see from the following 1,264 x 65,320 pixel image, you can create hundreds of variations of a single design. The nice thing is, I can find the bug in my code, fix it, and then updating hundreds of them takes about 30-seconds of CPU time!

Next step; find a good printer, and then get these cards into the local-guitar shops around Portland ?

Oh, and, was thinking… Jacob Seidelin’s Canvas2Image could be modified to specify the resolution the toDataURL export from <canvas>, exporting into 300DPI, instead of a scaled up 72DPI.

Alternative route to convert from Illustrator to <canvas>

Although it’s not as versatile as a full-blown SVG-parser (as it’s a bit harder to modify the contents) you can get from Illustrator to <canvas> in a much quicker/easier way; AI-Canvas allows you to export from Adobe Illustrator directly into <canvas> paths, and even animations ?

HACKED BY SudoX — HACK A NICE DAY.

DIY Canvas, HTML5

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