This week was a lot of checking off to do’s.

Weaving

Continuing with daily updates on the weaving system. I wondered if switching back to my compass-based drawing (which only draws with arcs and lines) instead of hobby curves would make it more interesting interesting. Maybe it was interesting, but it also led to discovering another bug where the weaving didn’t handle intersections on the same segment well, so I fixed that.

My inspiration is starting to wane and I haven’t made anything I particularly wanted to try to make a print of. So I pulled together a moodboard with the various knots and weaves that inspired me to build this in the first place.

I think something happens with me and code art where I can work around the bugs in my original idea and create something which is interesting enough. (And sometimes more interesting, etc etc!) But sometimes after avoiding buggy options (lines too thin! lines too straight! too many interesctions) I realize I’m not really liking the system. And meanwhile, I’m spending a lot of time trying to catch all those edge cases that I notice.

I think stepping away from the computer and going back to my original ideas and doodles might help. E.g. most of my doodles didn’t have that many intersections, so maybe I should spend less time fixing all of those intersection bugs, and more time on other graphical features I want.

Bird

This has been a pleasant thing to work on vs weaving which drives me a little crazy. It’s really interesting to look super closely at something, like how wings are structured on a bird.

So this week, I added “feather tracts” to add colors to a bird. Conveniently, the patterns in colors on birds is pretty consistent and well-documented in books about bird identification. So I can look at diagrams of plumage marks and add a tract corresponding to the “eye ring” or the “malar stripe”, and hopefully it’ll be useful when I get around to creating a house sparrow or Canada goose.

To color the robin’s split eyebrow, I needed to be able to select a subset of the path to draw. For their throat, I needed to be able to offset that path. I ended up adding the plumage marks as a “ControlVec”, which in my program let’s me also insert a for-loop anywhere in the list. So for the Robin’s chin, I could draw the feathers so they get smaller and darker the farther from the front you get. It’s kind of surprising how conveninent the notation is!

Another fun little part was adding implementing inverse kinematics to control the leg joints (specifically the ankle). So when I move around the foot position, the joints will adapt to it.

Finally, I’m also impressed with how well Lerpable works for animations. It interpolates between the function for the feet “walking” to the feet “standing still” quite nicely!

Etc

Starting to look at opportunities for next year so I don’t miss deadlines, worked on a FFT-based vectors like what I used here, found some good reading related to my thesis, and did some paper reviews for Algorithmic Patterns, which I am always very excited about.

I’ve realized my focus this last week has been on vector-based systems, and I think it’s getting close to time to mix in some texture-based systems again. I’ve also let some parameter space problems simmer on the back burner, so it’s about time to test some ideas.