Esfera mod by spxl 5 6 January, 2009 at 10:11 am
Esfera_mod_by_spxl_5
based on Esfera.pde by David PenaSource code:
Esfera_mod_by_spxl_5.pde
Hair.pde
Oscillator.pde
Category / Graphics
Radial Gradient Array 28 November, 2008 at 6:08 pm
RadialGradient_mod_by_spxl
based on RadialGradient.pde by Ira GreenbergSource code: RadialGradient_mod_by_spxl.pde
Here’s another Processing sketch I’ve been fiddling about with for more time than is probably reasonable… this one is just 2D, and, once again, based on one of the basic examples provided with the Processing Development Environment. The original program painted some nice circles with gradient fills. Just once. No animation or anything tricky. Looking under the hood I was curious about a comment that didn’t seem to reflect the behaviour of the code:
// hack to ensure there are no holes in gradient // needs to be increased, as radius increases float gapFiller = 8.0;
The gapFiller wasn’t changed anywhere, and the implication of this value is that 8 points are plotted per degree rotation around the circumference of each circle, regardless of the radius (note that one solid disc in the final image is generated by plotting successive rings of increasing radius). Anyhow, since the circumference is linearly proportional to the radius, I figured that replacing this constant with some other constant divided by the radius (of the current ring) would be a good idea. I ran the program a bunch of times trying to find the smallest such constant that seemed to produce “gapless” discs up to a reasonable size. I also played with the idea of interpolating the radius step (eg step by 0.5 pixels instead of 1 pixel per ring) with a reduced angle interpolation – by this method the number of plots can be reduced, but finding an optimum pair of values seemed like a pretty hit-and-miss affair and was never going to be as sensible as a properly optimised circle drawing algorithm anyway. Having int-based parameters to specify exact pixel locations seems “close enough” for this sketch, and reduces a fair amount of confusion!
I quickly became tired of having to wait for the entire scene to be rendered before getting to see any of it, so decided to replace the array-filling loops with a draw() method that produced only a single disc on each invocation, and effectively moved the loop outside that by using some global variables to keep track of where we’re up to. I also switched over to using radians directly instead of needlessly converting between degrees and radians all the time, and of course did away with the duplication of the angle calculation (in the original program, j and angle are almost the same, differing only in when they are incremented, and should effectively cover the same circle’s-worth of angles) and moved the colour calculation out of the angle loop, since the colour is the same for a given radius. I’ve also replaced the manual colour calculations with the colorLerp() function provided by Processing. Yay for easy. It does make me wonder, though, on what basis the examples provided are included. This example has quite a few problems!
I also decided it would be nice to space the discs out a bit, and then started becoming heavily involved with working out how to space the discs evenly, especially so that the gap between the discs was the same as the gap between the discs and the edge(s). From there I moved on to asking, what if I want the gap to be proportional to the size of the disc? What size should the discs be, and where should they be centred? Than further still, what should that proportion be if I want the area covered by the circles to be some proportion of the total area? (For this case I’m talking about the average coverage of a single square “unit”, where one unit can be formed as a square whose corners are the centres of four adjacent circles. That is, I decided the visual average over the majority of the space was important, not at the edges where I simply want uniform spacing, especially since, if the rectangle to be filled is not square, the spacing to the edges in the shorter dimension will mostly not be uniform with the rest of the spacing – instead the arrangement is simply centred, keeping the circle-to-circle spacing uniform). Eyes glazed over yet? ;o)
I’ve kept on with the theme of making the sketches interactive to some degree as well, so have inclded keyboard controls for various parameters. After much playing around, eventually getting away from annoying calculations for those obscure ratios and moving towards “what makes this fun and interesting to look at?” the sketch is now in it’s present almost VJ-able form… well, in a winamp visualisation kind of way, only I haven’t sussed out audio reactivity yet – guess what my next plans are? :o)
-spxl
Esfera’s marching two by two! Hurrah! Hurrah! 9 November, 2008 at 12:41 pm
So then, since the las post I’ve had a play with Processing. I decided to put some oscillators in to shake things up a bit… I created a few global variable names something like SPHERE_RADIUS_VARIATION_AMPLITUDE_PROPORTION, but found them beastly to work with (long lines ahoy!), and that was with only one oscillator, so then decided to have a crack at creating a new class for an oscillator.
Exciting stuff, to be sure. Well, it was at least mildly exciting to get it working soon enough with only the existing code as a guide and a vague stab in the dark as to how to call a constructor from within a constructor…
I also decided to colour the black sphere something… other than black, so you could better see the oscillations, and also where the edge(s) are. The inner sphere pulsates, as does the “outer sphere” of hairs. When you move the mouse, the inner sphere, or ‘heart’, beats faster and faster… but slows down if you don’t move the mouse. Moving the mouse also causes the outer hair sphere to expand as though being flung out by the speed of the mouse movement. The number of the hairs which are rendered cycles up and down too, from sparse to dense and back again.. and again… and again! Nothing too exciting, but overall it is somewhat more engaging than the original sketch.
The code is starting to get ratty again though… plenty of magic numbers in there without explanations. The Oscillator class helps quite nicely though. Yay for that! :o)
Esfera_mod_by_spxl_2
based on Esfera.pde by David PenaSource code:
Esfera_mod_by_spxl_2.pde
Hair.pde
Oscillator.pde
The sketch is was thrown into the same directory as the “original” sketch with the hoping that the close-to-one-megabyte OpenGL library (jogl.jar) would be loaded just once by a user’s browser for separate visits to the two different sketches.
If not, well, I guess there’s no helping some things.
Meanwhile, it’s pleasing to note that the “workflow” I outlined in the last post worked pretty well for getting the new sketch online and into the blog. I did cheat a bit by copy’n'pasting the HTML for the linking from the blog, then doing a search’n'replace of “_spxl” with “_spxl_2″, and didn’t feel any need to otherwise change the descriptive attributes of tags. It won’t always be so easy,
-spxl
Go with the flow at 8:09 am
A lone voice in the emptiness of web-space called out to me, asking about how I posted a Processing sketch to my blog. Gabriel’s comment:
Hi
first off, love the sketch. I am looking for a dead simple way to post my sketches on a blog. For the image above, are you doing a screengrab and then cleaning it up? Is there a ‘tool’ out there for grabbing one without the tedium of either adding code to the sketch itself or having to go into photoshop and crop out all the unwanted stuff?
what’s your workflow?
I can’t take the credit for the coolness of the sketch – it was written by David Pena and came as part of the processing-0144.zip download from Processing.org – I only tinkered with it a bit.
In any case, I don’t know exactly what I did, and I know that I rearranged the files on my webserver some time after the original post, but here’s the general idea (with a note that I’m running under Windows XP):
Export from Processing
Get the sketch up and running in the Processing Development Environment. Cool (thanks Davin Pena and the people who built Processing, the Open GL engine, et al). I think the sketch needs to be saved before doing an export, so do that if you haven’t already, and do an export [File > Export (Ctrl+E)]. This creates a folder called “applet” in the same location as the saved sketch (where the .pde file is). In this folder are all the files that are needed to run (or might be needed, such as the system-dependent JOGL files for various operating systems), and which you somehow need to get on to your webserver later.
Grab a screenshot
In my case, I used IrfanView to take a screenshot whilst the sketch was running. IrfanView, if you don’t already know it, is a small, fast and free (to use, for non-commercial purposes; not open source) image viewing application for Windows. it has a bunch of basic editing features built in, like screen/window capture, which I use quite often, so am familiar with the shortcuts and how it is set up.
Not necessary to understand, but since the question asked about things being easy… Note that once you’ve done the following a couple of times, it becomes easy enough and fast enough for most purposes.
- Open IrfanView. For me, this means three keystrokes (Windows Key, i, i) because I have an “Image” program folder in my main “Start menu” and “Irfanview” is the only entry starting with “i” in that folder. It might take 5-10 seconds on my machine the first time, but note that this is a 4-years old install of Windows XP on a laptop running (still “working”, amazingly enough, despite several chances to die horribly installing service packs and possibly hundreds of applications going in and out besides!). Still, better than waiting for Photoshop for a small job.
- Start screen capture [Options > Capture/Screenshot... (C)]. I use the “Foreground window – Client area” option with hotkey (Alt+Z), showing the captured image in the main window… these options will be obvious when you’re running IrfanView.
- Give focus to the running sketch, hit the hotkey (Alt+Z in my case)… easy.
- Cleanup (optional): I wanted to give more prominence to the ball, so a crop was in order. Create a selection – you can left-click-drag a rectangle, or, as I wanted a certain size, I used [Edit > Create a custom crop selection... (Shift+C)]. There are plenty of options; I wanted 4:3 aspect, and entered 450 for the width, which automatically set 337 for the height. You can also specify the top-left corner of the selection, however I usually leave this as (0,0) and after the selection is made use right-click-drag to position the crop selection. Once you’re happy with the selection, [Edit > Crop selection (Ctrl+Y)] performs the crop.
- Save the image: [Edit > Save as... (S)] (note that, unusually, (Ctrl+S) is for Save and (S) on it’s own is Save as, however since this image is from the clipboard and not a file it doesn’t make any difference). There are many image formats you can save out to (I think you need to install the IrfanView plugins to get some of them; I recommend the plugins for the JPEG lossless rotate if nothing else). I’ve decided to use the same base filename as the sketch and put it in the “applet” directory with all the other files needed to run the sketch. (This probably isn’t what I did in the first instance, but could be in future!)
Get it online
For me, this meant using FTP to upload all the files in the “applet” directory to my web host. My original plan involved creating a “processing” subdirectory from my web root, with a separate “applet” directory for each sketch, renamed from “applet” to the name of the applet.
eg. web_root/processing/Esfera_mod_by_spxl
I created a new blog entry (I’m using self-hosted WordPress) and inserted an image (specifying the full URL http://subpixels.com/processing/Esfera_mod_by_spxl/Esfera_mod_by_spxl.png for the image src), hyperlinked to the “applet” directory (using the full URL).
This worked just fine.
It bothered me that the library files were so big – not because of the space required, since I have some 500 gigabytes available…), but because of how long it takes me to upload even a few megabytes. Yes, I am impatient; around 20k/sec is not a speed I am happy with, but I digress. I also had the intention of, at some time in the near future, to upload a bunch of sketches, and realised the burden of downloading the libraries every time isn’t something anyone needs. It might be possible, but I couldn’t figure out how to get a sketch running that referenced libraries in another folder.
What’s the answer? Put everything in the same folder, of course!
(2009-01-06 edit: the everything-in-one-folder solution wasn’t working out so well, so I have rearranged my Processing content into separate folders for each sketch. The following notes are therefore no longer accurate, nor recommended!)
So the file structure was as follows:
- http://subpixels.com/
-
- processing/
- Esfera_mod_by_spxl.html – sketch’s web page
- Esfera_mod_by_spxl.jar – applet archive
- Esfera_mod_by_spxl.java – Java source
- Esfera_mod_by_spxl.pde – Processing source
- Esfera_mod_by_spxl.png – screenshot image
- ..and all the other required files…
The hyperlinked screenshot HTML looked (almost) like this:
<a title="subpixels.com: processing applet | Esfera_mod_by_spxl"
href="http://subpixels.com/processing/Esfera_mod_by_spxl.html">
<img src="http://subpixels.com/processing/Esfera_mod_by_spxl.png"
alt="Processing sample: Esfera mod by spxl" /></a>
Of course, a linked image caption costs extra. ;o) Something else I did was create a symbolic link named “index.html” which I’ve pointed to “Esfera_mod_by_spxl.html” so that anyone navigating to http://subpixels.com/processing for a poke around didn’t get a directory listing. I could have just renamed (or copied) the Esfera_mod_by_spxl.html file, but that would be too easy…
And for your edification, the result, with the updated Processing code, executible, Java file and screenshot. I’m uploading the new files now. Okay, maybe not now, but soon. (This reminds me of a scene from Spaceballs…).
Esfera_mod_by_spxl
based on Esfera.pde by David PenaSource code: Esfera_mod_by_spxl.pde
Something I didn’t note earlier, is that I put in a mousePressed() callback to start/pause the animation when the mouse is clicked. I’ve put in some new comments about that, modified the code slightly to be clearer for people new to programming, and added/updated various other comments.
I probably wouldn’t recommend embedding the applet itself into your blog posts, since several posts on one page means several applets, and if anyone else’s system is like mine and takes aaaages for the Java runtime to load for the first time, people are going to leave your blog possibly before even seeing any of your content… probably not what you’re hoping for!
I’m sure putting everything in the same directory will come to bite me on the arse when I want to start using a data directory, but that could be solved by the sketches having their own named subdirectories I suppose.
(2009-01-06 note: my arse was bitten when Processing 1.0 was released as the OpenGL libraries changed!)
Perhaps I should stop concerning myself with such things until I actually publish another sketch… That’s right, I put one sketch online and stopped right there!
I have half a mind to create a WordPress plugin to handle some of the details nicely. The other half of my mind is saying, “What do you know about creating WordPress plugins?!” :o)
And now to test the multiple-sketches-in-one-directory theory… Stay tuned!
-spxl
kickflip! 28 August, 2008 at 7:13 am
From the Endless Distractions department…
A short animation created, initially, in Mozilla Thunderbird. I promise, it’s true! I was typing an email and wanted to put a devil smiley, but didn’t like the way the first one I typed looked. What’s the “usual” smiley for the devil? Websearch, distraction, see something stupid about a Ninja turtle on a skateboard on the Canonical Smiley List that looks a little like so:
:)->()<]:
“Rubbish!” I thought, but decided I liked the skateboard and decided to make my own skater. I think Thunderbird is set up to use Times New Roman, but displayed below in the same manner as the Ninja turtle for comparison.
1:o)k|:
Hmm, not so bad. Here’s a screenshot of what I was looking at. Mind you, I actually picked up my laptop and rotated it to look at it a few times, but I’ve rotated the image below for you to save your neck and/or your equipment!
And on the end, there he is, for your entertainment, performing a kick flip (in super-slow-mo, so you can catch the action). Enjoy!
-G.
Site upgrades, photo galleries and more 17 August, 2008 at 8:33 pm
There should be an image gallery just above this: some still captures of the visuals I mix. There should also be a couple of random images in the sidebar.
Over the past few days I’ve been tidying up the contents of my webserver. The other day I noticed that the gallery was broken, and it took a little while to sort out whatever the problem was. Changed some directory permissions and server settings, and upgraded to the latest version of the software. I’ve deleted some unused CMS’s and their databases, made some database backups, and upgraded WordPress. I’ve had a play with some WordPress settings, like running a second blog off the same content folder (containing plugins and themes, etc), changing themes, using Widgets, and installing some new plugins, most notably a gallery plugin – something I really needed to get sorted to be able to post photos in some sort of nice manner. I managed to wreck the second blog for a while, and delved into some PHP programming to see what was going wrong. It sorted itself out in the end.
I’ve also revised some tags and categories for existing posts in this blog: the Subpixel category should now take you to all posts that are about me, gig’s I’ve performed at (subcategory Subpixel’s Gigs), or that have creations (subcategory Creations) to show such as photos, graphics, videos, and software (eg Flash, Processing).
There is something wrong with the Flash plugin I’m testing out (pb-embedFlash), which I was rather hoping to use to embed videos and Flash animations. I might try working on a filter to embed (or at least link to) Processin sketches… but one thing at a time – first I need to create some more Processing examples! I’ve come up with a simple solutions for what to do with multiple hosted sketches (applets) to get around the problem I mentioned earlier of there being a heavy download for the OpenGL libraries: just have everything in one directory, with the index.html file from the generated applet folder renamed to have the sketch name. So simple it might just work.
-G.
Hundreds & thousands 18 March, 2008 at 2:29 am
According to the statistics… there are apparently some people (or ‘bots’) out there consuming my site content – mainly the gallery. For example, 1797 pageviews on Wednesday, or 0.2GB of traffic, but only 8 ‘unique’ visitors. Other days range from a few to several hundred pageviews, but not over 8 unique visitors in any day.
I wonder if it is people just casually browsing – maybe even friends who just don’t mention it – or some process mass-downloading images for some other purpose.
Meanwhile, when I came to write something this evening I discovered subpixels.com was offline – it turns out the reason being that the IP address specified in the DNS was ‘incorrect’. It was working a couple of days ago… it seems that my host had changed something and neglected to tell me. It seems to be okay now, though, if a little slower than usual (at least from where I sit).
I’ve decided that I should use my graphics tablet more while I have handy access to it – so far it’s hardly ever been used. Hence the Chinese characters here… an attempt by me to copy a wall hanging that I have in my room using Inkscape. I remember I bought it at one of those joss stick and millions of buddhas places in the city, but I can’t remember what the writing is about. Properity? Health? Happiness? Hopefully someone can enlighten me. Please contact me if you can translate, even if my calligraphy is a bit… well, first-attempt! :o)
In other graphics-related news, I’ve been working on some new visuals, and have a few screenshots to share. I still haven’t got around to connecting my mini-DV camcorder to capture video yet, and still haven’t replaced my digitial ‘still’ camera so can’t take a video of the screen! On that subject, though, I read in the past couple of days that Canon are about to release a new Ixus with a 5x optical zoom. Zoom, zoom! A 10 megapixel sensor as well, which might be a bit ridiculous in a compact camera, but I’m sure I won’t be complaining about it too much if I end up purchasing one. Of course it looks like the target price for the next purchase is about to jump up a couple of hundred bucks… don’t you hate it how they get you that way?
I’ve almost finished reading The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot. I think when I’m done I might go back and read Part I again, as that was the most interesting part. I should make some notes this time – I’m sure there’s inspiration for some new graphics in there! I’m also interested in finding out more about holographic film – the kind that requires a laser to ‘view’ the recorded hologram.
I received notification of a new version of MemoriesOnTv today, which serves as a reminder to get cracking on making something of the thousands of images captured while I was in Europe… too many to show to friends without some serious culling! And now I have the disc space as well… no more excuses? Hopefully a shiny new release in the near future! :o)
-G.
Orders of magnitude 9 March, 2008 at 2:23 am
Not just one. Not even two. Three. And a bit. count ‘em! One!.. order of magnitude. Ah-ah. Two!.. orders of magnitude. Ah-ah. Three!.. Three orders of magnitude! Ah-ah!
Orders of what, you ask? Space. Not to move, but maybe to ‘grow’. I’ve been long suffering with disk space issues – Windows telling me that volume D: is low on space, and Volume C: is very low on space – seemingly every few minutes – was starting to get to me. It’s only taken me a week (since I took it down from the cupboard) to get my external drive reconnected. We’ve been ‘apart’ for about 8 months now… the separation anxiety must have passed some time ago. Probably swallowed up by the experience of roaming about in Europe for a few months. Anyhow, my hundred-meg-or-so between two internal drive partitions situation has improved by over a thousand times: the external disk G: has 255 gigabytes free. Even though I know it’s true, it’s hard to really fathom. Two and a half thousand times more space. Wow. Who’da thunk it? It brings into perspective how much we really take technology for granted.
My first hard drive, an A590 side-car unit for my Amiga 500, was 20MB, with an (at the time) impressive 2MB Fast-Ram expansion. Sure, it was a step up from using floppies, but it wasn’t all that massive; only – around 25 discs. These days you can score a Terabyte drive for not much more (actually… maybe less!) than the A590 was back in the day. Of course you need to account for inflation, and back then I didn’t have so much spare cash… but still, a terabyte is over 200 DVDs. Er, let me recalculate that – to be fair I should probably be talking dual layer DVDs, not single layer… Well, you do the math. It’s still an impressive number of whatever units you’re talking about.
I’ve used my ‘little’ USB memory stick these past couple of days (not amazingly effectively, but at least got it out of my bag and plugged it into something!) – even that raises the question of how this $100+ piece of technology from only 2 years ago can now be had for around $10 (for 1GB, and okay, maybe the brand makes a difference, but sill). The mind boggles. In the same timeframe it seems that drink prices have gone up a couple of bucks… who is making the money? (Or, perhaps more worthy of consideration, what are we, generally, wasting out money on?) Something isn’t right.
In all, I wish I was ‘wasting my money’ out at Wiseman’s Ferry this weekend, catching the likes of Kruder & Dorfmeister, Steve Bug, and Tiefschwarz at the Playground Weekender music festival. Had a case of the kinda-sensibles and decided I need to focus a bit on work… what’s happening to me?! For future reference, leaving the office nearly 24 hours after you arrive probably isn’t that sensible. At least not without a proper nap. :o)
I think K&D are doing a 4 hour audiovisual set tonight. Probably right now. Can’t hear it. Can’t see it. Missing out! Actually, I think Tiefschwarz are meant to be playing at the Chinese Laundry tonight… I went down to Laundy a couple of weeks ago to see Gui Boratto – I went to see him at Fabric in London last year, but was disappointed by the situation with the room being too crowded to dance in. And what was it like at Laundy two weeks ago? Bloody awful… stood outside in the queue for an hour, watching dozens of people on the ‘guestlist’ go in before me. Even after 1am. Poor form, Laundry. Poor form. When I asked about the situation at the front desk, I was informed that ‘this is common now in Sydney’. News to me. I can only hope the girl was lying or sadly mistaken. In any case, Gui did good, but the venue failed. I don’t think I’ll be heading back there for any more gigs in the near future. 25 bucks for a 1 hour wait with inconsiderate door staff and/or a really awful door policy (most of the people waiting were pretty pissed off).
Enough of the bad stuff already!… I’ve been rearranging some files on my drives (internal and external) to make better use of the available s.p.a.c.e… and became distracted by some software lying about. A mysterious ISO I had sitting in a temp folder: OpenCD v07.02, file date in March last year. What’s this?.. Ahh.. an Open Source software compilation. :o) The Open CD project is no longer active, but seems to have turned in to Open Disc – High quality open source software for Windows. Worth a look. In any case, as a result ended up downloading a newer version of Inkscape (an Open Source vector graphics editor) and had a squiggle. I should get my Wacom tablet out and start doing some more squiggles… I want some more vector-art-type stuff to use as overlays in my visuals, and would prefer to use my own content if I can, though might have an experiment for a while mixing ‘available’ materials.
-G.
PS: News just in (shortly after posting this item) via text message from a friend:
Hey giorgio! Future music fest 2day-night, chemical bros best fucken visual show i ever saw! U missed a good one.
Double damn!! ;o)
HLSL pixel shaders 13 February, 2008 at 12:56 am
I’ve been trying to learn some HLSL (“HLSL is the High Level Shading Language for DirectX”), or at the very least use HLSL to create some new effects for use in Neon v2. Neon allows you to use real-time, hardware pixel shaders to manipulate each layer in the composition. Part of the problem has been that the example files I’ve been tinkering with give very little to no explanation of what exactly is going on, and when you make a mistake (or try to do something that isn’t allowed, isn’t supported, etc), all you get is… well, the effect doesn’t work (at all), and you get no further information.
When I had searched for information on other occasions, I might not have been looking particularly hard, but maybe it just wasn’t obvious where to find it. The MSDN (Microsoft Developers Network) documentation is ‘obviously’ where to find it, supposing that first of all you know that is obvious! :o)
What I’ve tried to do is combine more than one (existing) effect into a single, composite effect. One that I’ve managed to pull off that I quite like is being able to apply a sobel outline to just part of the image – that part defined by a separate texture (in this case loaded from a PNG image). Rather than just use a single ‘channel’ (red, green, blue, or the ‘alpha’ of an image) I allow three separate channels (R,G,B), or any combination of the three, and/or any combination of the inverse of each channel. That is, you can use the ‘shape’ or the negative of the shape. Yes, this of course means lots of inputs to the effect, but the more knobs the merrier, hey? Not necessarily, but it gives a lot of options!
My most recent attempt – and that is since having had a read of the docs! – has been to make a gradual fade-in type effect, based on an image, which goes from a totally ‘underexposed’ mask (for want of a better term, meaning that even the highest value is dropped to zero), through to 100% ‘exposed’ (using the mask just ‘as is’), and finally through to totally ‘overexposed’ (even the lowest value from the mask bumped up to 100%) – with the exception that a zero level from the mask always remains at zero.
Of course, I’ve employed the idea of using the red, green and blue channels of the mask image separately – mainly so that there can be three independent (or overlapping!) areas of audio reaction – which I managed to get working, so far as I could tell, but then went off on a mystery tour of attempting to colourize based on the three channels. What I have so far is a bit of a mess – not entirely uninteresting, mind you, but not what I envisaged… part of the problem is perhaps not having spent enough time on the envisaging part! More thought needs to go into what I actually mean for, say, the red and blue parts to be overlapping – what should the combined ‘alpha’ value be (since there is a single apha value for any given pixel), is one of the main problems – perhaps deciding the R,G,B values is less complex, but still not sorted out. When, for example, do you add in some blue? And how much blue? Use a value from the mask (percentage, or on/off?), on the source image/video, or both? Or what? Perhaps it is, or will be, a good thing that there are so many options. I just need to implement some and see how they look.
Another ‘problem’ I’m faced with is the mechanism within Neon for using effects – an effect is tied to a particular source, not a layer, which means if I switch to another item in the layer, the effect goes with the video/whatever. The newer version of Neon I’d downloaded ages ago proposes to allow effects layers for other than the last/top layer, but unfortunately I can’t get it to work on my machine… even if I could, it is distinctly lacking in usable functionality, which is not so good.
Perhaps I should invest some more time in selecting (indeed, creating!) some more clips, graphics, masks (for my existing effects), and getting on to creating some text animations… I might have a gig this week – at Q Bar on Thursday night – but haven’t heard back from the guy I emailed about it. And of course I lost his phone number when I put my SIM card in a new phone this evening… d’oh!
-G.
10 Years on the Web 16 January, 2008 at 1:05 am
I think I must be getting old. Nostalgic. Back in the day, when I was a long-haired uni student, a lot of my friends knew me as ‘Bill’, the nickname I used online. Being a regular kind of name name, people often thought it was my real name, or just remembered it more easily. Anyhoo… I had a Geocities website (now Yahoo! Geocities), as was the trend at the time which hung around for a while. I guess it was the day’s MySpace. I have a copy of the main graphics dated early to mid 1998, and pages that were updated on 25/Jun/2001 for a reappearance at the time. The index page was last modified on 09/Aug/2001, and now the site reappears once again!
Original Banner Graphic from “Bill’s Website” circa 1997-98
The graphics were hand-crafted by me – a result of playing with Photoshop (3?) for a few days – and aren’t actually half bad. Well, they weren’t at the time! :o) The Nine Inch Nails discography pages were absolute hell to make, especially the Tracks page – hand crafted list of every track, listed in order of track name, hyperlinked to the album/release it is from on one of the other pages. Probably written using Notepad or maybe even the EDIT.COM DOS text editor! Dreamweaver, eat your heart out!
Link: Bills Website
-G.
