In the last few months I’ve played with creating a number of generative visuals or generative visual interactives. This entails building a Flash application that contains a number of randomized visual creations but also allows me to have control over color, composition, and some drawing aspects. I’ve spread a few of these visuals around and have been asked to demonstrate how my simple application works. (You’ll notice the b/w header on my blog is a capture of this type of generative) Click more to see the video.
I’m not going into code details or the logistics of how the application works, but rather am showing how I can control the application to create the visuals. I keep adding graphic aspects to this application when I find time to pick it up and place with it. The video shows the process, below are a few samples of visuals I hung on to.
4 Comments
Very neat! I particularly like the first couple of pictures. It’s impressive to create such a visually stunning effect from random elements.
Awesome stuff. Your work with the color bar as a controller and how configurable it is is a nice touch. It would be awesome (maybe for your next experiment
) to make this an mp3 visualizer.
Unfortunately, I don’t have this posted anywhere – it is an SWF. And, you’re correct, the calculations do keep going when I pause the background—it really was set up rather quickly and the code is quite a mess, otherwise, I would post a working SWF and possibly even the code. I’ll be sure to let you know if I do clean this up!
Very nice.
Do you have a link to the SWF (or was it an AIR app?) that actually does this work. It would be neat to mess around with a bit.
Also, I noticed that when you pause it, it seems like the calculations keep going, while it only freezes the current frame. When you click resume, the currently displayed image is the image calculated however far down the line the calculations are at the moment (but it could have also been a video playback issue)
It shouldn’t be too hard to implement a real pause control, and a simple “nextFrame”, “prevFrame” so you can tweak the image to pause at just the right moment. I’ll gladly do the code for it if you need a hand. In fact, I’m quite curious of the source and would love to take a peek.
Andreas