Monthly Archives: December 2013

Reel to Real, a Christmas number 1?

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As we head into the christmas holidays I have a little present for you. It is the latest edition of Flush magazine for Christmas. Amongst all the other wonderful articles and information there on page 97 you can find my article Reel to Real. It is another journey through technology. Starting with me playing with a reel to reel spooling tape machine, passing through and including Roland Rat – Superstar, Instant Music and heading on to Melodyne (which has been on the radar a while)and the wonderful Rocksmith 2014 with a few other bits in between. Maybe leading to a self composed xmas number one tune next year 😉

@tweetthefashion have, as I always say because its true, done a wonderful piece of work in laying out and adding style and finesse with pictures, fonts and lots of hard graft to make my words look good. A huge thank you and bundle of christmas cheer goes to them. It’s been a great year with a lot of articles
So if you are sitting there, fed up watching the Italian Job again, give it a little look 🙂
Have a great Christmas and New Year. See you on the other side.

Grow me a virtual universe – No Man’s Sky

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I was excited to see the new project from Hello Games get a lot of blog and press time the last few weeks. If you don’t know who Hello Games are they are an indie development team who brought us the delightful cartoon fun of Joe Danger. A guy on a motorbike leaping and ducking around a number of tricky levels. It is hard not to bump into Joe Danger on every platform now, but I remember their stories of toil and trouble at Develop where they had houses mortgaged to the hilt in a last ditch attempt to get the game out. Whilst they have capitalised on, and followed up Joe Danger they have also been hard at work on an incredibly diverse project.
Joe Danger is a cute, side scrolling reaction game. It has a certain something, using an existing format but making it more fun, rather like Angry Birds has done.
The new work though is stunning in its claims. They have built a sandbox universe, not a sandbox city, desert or planet. No, a huge space of planets with detail on those planets. The claim is that everything is procedurally generated. Just to clarify, that means that rather than sitting drawing everything by hand, it is code that generates the places in a defined style. Behaviours of creatures, races, vehicles etc can also be put into this. Way back elite had a procedurally generated universe of names of planets. However you did not visit those planets and swim in their oceans. It was also not a shared space with others online. Terrain and in particular trees, or anything of a more ractal nature are often procedurally generated, like the famous Barnsley fern. This ramps that up a whole level. Of course in fractal maths complexity is the same at every level of abstraction so the detail of a leaf is the same as the pattern of the universe. It, rather like probability maths, tends to go against our common sense approach to the world. However when you ponder it a bit longer it does start to make sense.
With this sort of background information the video below gets even more interesting. Procedural generation at an atomic level. A world that your presence in influences its development. A place that is not technically infinite, but so big it would take more than a lifetime to explore. That is all very exciting stuff!

There is a good article with some more detail and a proper interview, rather than my speculation based on how I would do this over at destructiod
I am looking forward to this one though. Well done Hello Games welcome to the metaverse industry 🙂

CKD supercars

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Further to my post on digital art I spent a good few hours last night on a version of the Choi Kwang Do logo so that I could plaster that on my custom paint work cars on Xbox One Forza 5. This is quite an undertaking as this is not pixel art. Various coloured stickers have to be manipulated to form the design. The font is not quite right but as this is often fast moving it is the general impression that is important.
****UPDATE 13/12/13 added video
Here is a mini video clip of all the various pieces of sticker used in this

What I really need to prove is that the Drivatar (that is my driving habits in an AI car) is actually using my design. This seems to be the case on the local machine for certain as my Drivatar and car paint work was appearing in other people races on the console. So if you see a CKD logo on a Subaru, Mini, LaFerrari or Viper let me know 🙂 It could be this is the next frontier of in game advertising. Rather like a tweet or retweet can become. If it is no longer just restricted to delivering your designs to people when you race on multiplayer.
scoobyckd
scoobyckdbumper
VyperCKD
LaFerrariCKD
LaFerrariCKDarch
It is approaching 5 years since I first put the Feeding Edge logo out for a test run on a Tshirt and a few other places 🙂 Here are some of the older ones
There is so much scope over and above banner ads and in game billboards to get a message across. Sounds like another use case I need to isolate and write up?

Art and technology

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You may have noticed that whilst I am primarily a techie I do like to dabble and explore the potential of art with technology. I am well aware though, and often have to explain, that I am not a graphic designer or an artist. My creative toolkit is code and components. It may even be considered unusual combination of applications in a sort of collage of code. Nearly everything needs some sort of interface though. I am constantly frustrated that my vision of what something should look like is often not quite what I manage to achieve with the tools I have to hand. However, I have often thought that with a limited number of pixels on a screen and a pallete of colours with enough time and effort it must be possible to make something close to perfect as an image. Of course the key there is time. It is really just a rewrite of the concept of an infinite number of monkeys and typewriters generating the complete works of Shakespeare!.
I was struck, this week, by an ipad painted image of Morgan Freeman that was doing the rounds of social media. I had only seen the finished image. Whilst everything was saying it was a painting it seemed just too good. So I was amazed but skeptical. Then last night I the video below showing the stages of the painting captured as it happened. This is truly stunning.

It is the work of Kyle Lambert and looking at his portfolio it is hard not to feel that he has reached a level that very few other people ever will. What is great though is a link to a lot of tutorials he has created and various articles so he is not keeping this talent to himself.
I would have though a picture of the quality of Morgan Freeman would have put me off even ever trying but instead I am more inspired to learn more about artistic techniques now and try and level up my coder art just a little bit.
Even tools like Forza 5 let us express ourselves artistically through the media of the automobile. The tools (as in previous Forza’s are a decal based approach, similar to Second Life prims that you have to shape and skew, layering up to create the look you want.
I have now upgraded my feeding edge logo and predator face a bit more and my flagship car (which was the Ferrari 430 is now the LaFerrari The predator mask has always worked well (IMHO) on cars with front scoops like the subaru Impreza.

However the LaFerrari has a brilliant cut out front that is even better. The back of the car has hardly any surface so I popped on a very small Feeding Edge logo under the Ferrari logo.
GetPhoto.ashx
Ok so it’s not a 200 hour Morgan Freeman ipad painting but its a start 🙂