A portfolio page. Should look familiar to anyone who reads this blog.
This is the wrap up. Well, normally it would be, but Digital Studio is just the first half of what is essentially a year-long subject. So instead of presenting something complete, this is where I’ll consolidate my work from this semester (it’s being presented in portfolio-form for class, but there’s nothing there that I haven’t already posted on this blog).
It was time to get physical this week, and I decided to create a small-scale mockup of where the project is currently at. I’m well aware that light projections will behave in different ways when in situ (as opposed to sitting on my computer screen), so playing with the intermediary stage of a model building facade is designed to present any problems before they get too… uh… big.
I’ve spent the last week madly trying to come to grips with coding in C and then learn C++, in an effort to get down and dirty with OpenGL. Doesn’t make for a particularly interesting journal entry. Fortunately though, my new band-pass filter arrived today, for the soon to be cracked open PS3 Eye.
To the dismay of my parents, I pulled apart just about every toy I owned as a child. Just to see how they worked. Rarely could I put them back together, but that was beside the point. Thanks to an excellent video tutorial, this little expedition went (mostly) according to plan.
MaxForLive controlling Z-position values in Quartz Composer.
Development was slow going this week. It started with the above test: controlling 3D shapes in Quartz Composer, by passing variables from Max/MSP (MaxForLive) via OSC. I was a little disappointed that the built in lighting patch for Quartz didn’t render shadows all that well, and so I set off on a snowballing series of tangents…
So, with the help of Kineme’s GL Tools, Quartz can create GLSL shaders using OpenGL. Obviously, this needs knowledge of the OpenGL language to be able to work with. OpenGL is based on C++, so that’s pretty important to know as well. And of course, when using C++, using an IDE like Xcode will come in handy. Unfortunately, all of these are completely foreign to me. There goes any progress for a while.
Playstation Eye camera. It’s days of not being pulled apart are numbered.
I bought the PS3 eye camera last year, knowing full well that with some clever modifications, it becomes a cheap solution for achieving relatively high-end motion tracking. Whilst I haven’t got around to taking the knife to my camera just yet, I have begun thinking about how motion tracking will work in my project and constructing some tests with Max/MSP (MaxForLive).
These are really the building blocks of what will ultimately become my final work. Whilst it’s unlikely that I’ll use these patches in anything resembling their current state, it’s an excellent process to see things work (or fail) on a smaller scale. Tools for this week: Max/MSP, Quartz Composer and live video input.
I had a moment (or twelve) of hesitation about the direction of my project this week. After speaking to one of the lecturers at uni, I received my first piece of constructive criticism around my approach to this project. I’d like to think that I encourage critique on my work and ultimately this was a positive development, although it did leave me a little concerned about how to move forward for rest of this year.
In previous posts, I have mentioned that I wanted to keep in mind that this work will act as a portfolio for myself. That whilst this is quite an abstract work in the scheme of my course, I would like it to also showcase some of the commercial skills I possess. Of course, this means using all those industry standard software packages that I seem to love and hate in equal measure on this blog.
I think my girlfriend secretly hates me. She’s currently head-down in books, doing her final/postgrad/super-diploma/masters/accreditation/thing to be a psychologist. Meanwhile, I’m playing with toys. Literally. And this is what I get to pass off as my final year of study. I’m so glad I didn’t listen to my parents.
Because we’ve just returned from a couple of weeks break, I haven’t had a chance to test any projects in situ. Instead, I’ve been trying out a bunch of different options for the hardware/software combination I will use in my final work. The main technologies I’ve taken a look at are the excellent DMaX (MaxForLive DMX lighting patch), cv.jit (OpenCV external for MaxForLive), Quartz Composer and OSC.
It was good. Actually, it was pretty great, but tempered by the fact that everyone had been telling me just how great it was for the past couple of months. Like Where The Wild Things Are and Alice In Wonderland (aka Alice In Wonderland: An IMAX 3D Experience), it was always going to struggle living up to the hype. I guess that’s the trouble when something is created to be accessible to all: suddenly everyone is a critic. Hat-off to Eliasson then that most of the critique was overwhelmingly positive.
Possibly reflecting the state of my own work process, what interested me most of all were the more basic, experiment-like pieces. Unlike many of the ‘high-brow’ art critics, I think this work is indeed as valuable and worthy as the final outcome.
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