Flickr: Flight404: Video Spiral Feedback, Sboyd: Boxes v3 Fire.
After my post about Flickr yesterday Robert Hodgin and Stephen Boyd have both posted some beautiful pictures to the Processing Pool. Enjoy!
(My apologies to Stephen Boyd and Processingblogs readers, who got an empty post with one of Stephen’s pictures when the aggregator caught an unedited post from Flickr. Worse still, the picture was uncredited. My bad.)
What follows is a pro-Flickr rant, so ignore at will…
Among the many unique features of the visual programming tool VVVV, one of the most enviable is the CTRL-3 shortcut for “Upload screenshot”. All screenshots are immediately uploaded to the vvvv.meso.net web site and shared with all users. It’s an excellent way to get an overview over what people are working on, and it’s simply a very cool community-building tool.
Personally, I publish sketches to Flickr regularly when working on a project. I sometimes even blog those pictures here. It serves as a repository of various versions, and lets users (both curators and random passers-by) comment on the work. What I like best is going back and seeing versions and ideas that went nowhere, and which I had forgotten about. From re-discovery it is a small step to resurrection…
There is a Flickr pool for Processing already, but sadly it doesn’t see much use right now. Uploading manually to Flickr is not as spontaneous as the VVVV function, but it still works well for showing off sketches etc. I’m hereby proposing that all Flickr-using Processing heads should upload their snapshots. Start by making your own Processing set, tag the images “processing.org” and add them to the Processing Pool. You’ll be surprised at how well it works as a sketchbook, where people can even comment on the work as it happens.
See the Flickr Processing Pool for what is already there. For some users who are making good use of Flickr, see the following:
See also the tag “processing.org” on Flickr. This is the best tag for letting people know that an image is Processing-related, and is the tag you should use on your blog or your del.icio.us account as well.
Of course, the use of Flickr in this way is not unique to Processing. flickr.com/photos/tags/jitter gives many more results than flickr.com/photos/tags/processingorg. Sometimes looking at flickr.com/photos/tags/generative/clusters/ can prove fruitful.
Flickr: C.stem: CMYK posters.
Proof positive of the power of PDF export in Processing: I have just uploaded images of 4 posters I’ve made for the upcoming C.stem exhibition in Turin. Using the new PDF export, I was able to effortlessly output print-ready files which were then finally prepped in InDesign. Using PDF has many advantages over the older libraries (AIExport, my own SimplePostscript etc):
As you can tell, I can not say how excited I am about the PDF output. Thank you, Ben!
This set of posters were output as black only, so that the printer could easily output a single film for each poster. They are then printed as a single-color process, with each using one of the CMYK colors. See also the Sketches Flickr set for in-progress examples, or C.Stem: CMYK posters (Original size) for a higher-res version.
Flickr: C3D 0035 no bg flat.
Real test of complex polygon models with PDF output from Processing, rasterized and monotoned in Photoshop. Some very few 3D rendering artifacts are visible, but considering the complexity of the scene it’s impressive.
hint(ENABLE_DEPTH_SORT) breaks PDF output for me, so haven’t been able to see if that would help with the few incorrectly sorted triangles visible to the right.
I am testing blogging pictures from Flickr.
This is a closeup of 3D shapes rendered as PDF with the new beginRaw() function in Processing. The results are amazing. Have a look at these for reference: 1, 2, 3, 4.
The upshot of this new function is that one can now output complex 3D geometry complete with transparency, and get practically identical images in PDF and OpenGL. I predict that a deluge of Processing print pieces will follow… I’ll post some sample code for this functionality in the next few days, it’s not so well documented yet, as it’s fresh out of Ben’s dungeon.
