pixel blog

From the What’s Cooking? department…

I’ve been to a couple of VJ events this week: the vjlondon.org meetup on Wednesday at T-Bar, and Immersion (a live experimental electronic music + visuals gig) on Thursday in The Flea Pit. I’ll mention that it’s great now living in Shoreditch, as both these venues are only a short walk away from my flat! :o)

Back to the story… it has occurred to me on more than one occasion that I will probably want (need?) to get into 3D at some point, and at these two events I saw some nice interactive 3D animation by pixelpusher (Evan Raskob), an earlier version of which can be seen in the video from the previous post (London VJ Meeting, Wed 9 July at T-Bar). I’m talking about the kinetic squiggles (which are input as gestures via his digital tablet) which zoom around. Evan had been working on this simple idea since last meetup, upgrading it from 2D only to 2D and 3D (combined), allowing multiple gestures to be loaded up as a set before “launching” (these are my own terms, I don’t know what Evan calls them!). I’ll have to clear some space on my Laptop (or get hold of another external drive – the one I brought with me from Sydney is out of reach at a friend’s house while they are at the Boom! festival in Portugal!) to upload the video I took at the event, and until then all I can say is that it looked quite amazing. That particular visual is produced in Processing from processing.org. I haven’t had much of a play with it just yet, but it looks promising! From the home page:

Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions. It is used by students, artists, designers, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook and professional production tool. Processing is an alternative to proprietary software tools in the same domain.

I’ve also had a word in my ear from Dr Mo about XNA the last couple of times we’ve met. I’d had the idea that I might use DirectX to build my own visuals engine at some point, and Mo’s feedback is that XNA is nice to work with, especially as the coding is done in C#.

I found myself installing the XNA Game Studio last night and discovered there is a free 3D modeling package: Truespace 7(.6) from Caligari. Upon further investigation I see that Caligari (or at least this product) is now owned by Microsoft, hence the plug from XNA. I remember the name “Caligari 4D”, and think it may have even been one of the packages available back in the day of the Amiga.

In any case, this eventually ends up in looking at videos of 3D animations, and this excellent example appears in Vimeo Staff’s Choice Picks:

Interstellar Sugar – Suryummy from Suryummy on Vimeo.

It reminds me of stuff done by the demoscene crew Farbrausch. If you like Suryummy’s video, you should check out the stuff that Farbrausch pump out in real-time!

Of course this video was created with software other than TrueSpace. Suryummy lists in a comment: maya, adobe*3, particular, live, reactor, absynth.

There is talk on the London Electronic Music Meetup (EMM) group about an Ableton Live DJ Workshop on a Saturday some time soon. I saw Live being used at Funckarma’s Dubstoned ep launch in London, but it wasn’t a “live” set, it was a DJ set, using Live. I want to know more… about using Live generally, but also because I know it has some sort of capability for triggering visuals. I have a project to work on with a DJ here in London, Unity Selekta, to produce visuals for his gigs, and I think I’m going to need some sort of sequencer. Live may be that sequencer.

-G.

Posted in: 3D Animation, C#, Group Meetings, Interactive, Parties & Nightlife, Personal Education, Processing, Shoreditch, T-Bar, The Flea Pit, VJ / Visuals, VJlondon.org, Work by subpixel / Tags: Ableton Live, demoscene, Dr.Mo, Farbrausch, Funckarma, Immersion, pixelpusher

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At the end of last year one of my mates was talking about problems he was having with staff for his company. They’d hired a graduate who looked good on paper but who then didn’t turn out so well. Following was a process of interviewing other potential employees, this time with some technical questions in the interview, and my friend was dismayed at the general lack of fundamental understanding from candidates – people who have supposedly completed degrees in computer science (or related) but who have problems with some basic concepts.

He asked if he could run the questions by me to see what I thought, and we sat out on his balcony one afternoon with him asking them to me similarly to in his interviews (perhaps a little less formally!). He’d lent me a book on C# programming the week before, and although at that point I’d only read around the first five chapters, that knowledge, and a vague recollection of some things I’d learned about C++ in uni many years ago, was enough to get me through more of the questions than any of the candidates he’d interviewed. After that he suggested that if I could get ‘up to speed’ in .Net then he might hire me… well, we’ve been talking about it some more, and I’ve been doing some learnin’ at home and in his office, and this week the company gave me an offer. Signed it today, so now it’s official. :o)

Of course now it means I have a little less free time on my hands, but it is in the city, so maybe I’ll be out and about a bit more.

The office is on the other side of the block to where I used to live. It’s a pity that now live out in the ‘burbs… I miss my city apartment!

-G.

Posted in: C#, Sydney, Work by subpixel /
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So the other day my webserver was moved to a new cluster. Things seemed fine until I had a poke around inside the Gallery and I discovered that thousands of symbolic links to image files are now invalid!

Contacted support, but there’s nothing much they can do. I can’t see how the links are set up, but on the basis that they aren’t working… I’m supposing that they include the path from the root. Since my home directory is now different to what it was on the other cluster, the old path points some place that doesn’t exist.

The process of building the galleries took days (I’d worked on it for hours at a time at various stages while I was away), and it’s not a pleasant thoght to have to mostly start over. The images themselves do exist in my filespace,  so I’m going to ee if I can replace the (currenlty broken) links with new links or with actual files, perhaps by removing the directories containing the links and moving/renaming the directories containing the files to Gallery’s data directory. Unfortunately the directory names are not the same (due to Gallery disallowing some of the characters), so it isn’t going to be a straightforward process.

Meanwhile, I’m learning C# .Net at the moment. I think it is going to take a while.

-G.

Posted in: Books, C#, Site Maintenance by subpixel / Tags: .Net, Gallery, symbolic links

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