Ancient Parchment, Procedurally Generated

With my current project, a full dome planetarium documentary about ancient astronomy, I was tasked with providing lots of CGI sequences with an antiquarian / da vinci style.  For the parchment I decided to approach it as an artistic challenge in itself.  It would have been easy to find some scanned, pre-made textures – but looking closely at these old parchment textures I could see that it followed the same principles of landscape, terrain, cloud like form and detail.  So I set about using Perlin noise type functions to build up a complex ancient parchment texture, purely from scratch out of mathematical functions essentially.  Below you can see the layers seperated and the final result.

 

And of course the magic of this approach is that I can animat a flowing sensation in the texture, by just playing around with numbers allowing everything to evolve and morph randomly.  You can see this in the demo video.

You could argue that almost every shape and form in nature could be created in such a way, as when you look closely you’ll see that it’s balance of chaotic randomness, and structured order – which is one way of defining Perlin noise.

 

Onedotzero – code warriors: a decade of processing

My music video for Peter Gabriel – The Nest That Sailed The Sky is featured in Onedotzero’s new Adventures in Motion festival – there’s a special free screening of Processing works this week at the BFI in London, details here and below.

 

code warriors: a decade of processing [FREE]

onedotzero celebrates 10 years of the programming language Processing. Open source, it encompasses a development environment and an online community promoting software literacy within visual arts. A specially curated highlights package of past and present works in motion in association with CreativeApplications.net. See extended session panel with artists Q&A and workshop.
Free drop-in screenings:
Thu 24 Nov | 12:00-14:30 | Studio
Fri 25 Nov | 14:30-1700 | Studio
Sat 26 Nov | 10:00-14:00 | Studio
Sun 27 Nov | 14:30-17:00 | Studio

Planetarium Dome Project

This is my latest project – I’m doing the CGI for a planetarium full dome film – the dome is a 360 degree screen that puts you ‘inside’ the film. The film is about ancient monuments like Stone Henge, and the emergence of the new science of archaeo-astronomy. I’m using 3d animation combined with my own self programmed filters built in Processing to create ye olde/da vinci sketched style on parchment. The parchment itself is a complex combination of fractal noise layers – I’ll do a separate blog on this next.  The cross hatching I’ve already showed exmples from in my previous ‘Flow of Life’ blogs.  These are just a few stills from the first scene in the film, and some empty parchment examples upon which all the CGI scenes will be ‘drawn’.

The Flow of Life – II

Some further experiments in Processing with perlin flow fields and polygonal ribbon strips used to create semi-abstract rugged, wild terrains with 3d depth and fog.

The Flow of Life

Just some early tests of perlin flow field stuff for some new projects I’ve started on.  Perlin flow fields use perlin noise as a vector field to create fluid like motion.

In one of my projects I’m using it to create the shapes of trees, landscapes, grass, growth, clouds.  In fact, this basic mathemical principle can be seen everywhere in nature,  either flowing in motion as with water, or staic in structure like tree branches.  Lots of examples below.

I’m using the same process for a cross hatching filter – you can see this below also as applied to a photograph of come clouds.