House and Contents

So here are the latest things to be added to the pile, a lamp and a little side table. I still have to figure out how to import objects from external files, since I've not been working like that so far and I think it would be useful.

Textmate spits the dummy

Come on Textmate, get it together mate.

Organising chaos

I've been playing with scale some more, and although my original ideas called for an approach that suggests some kind of gravity in the environment, I really like the floating trail of chairs, shrinking down to sit on the original chair.

I had an idea for arranging the chairs based on their angle too, and wanted to try it out. I'm not yet sure whether it's better than the chaotic mess it is otherwise. There's something more ... monolithic and intelligent about it now. It's much more sinister, especially with the chair legs facing out.

I then added some relative randomness, to rough it up a bit. The cold and orderly version has a different feel to the roughed up version, I think roughed up is more in line with my aims.

So the big question is: legs in or out?

Elle has suggested, and I think she might be right, that I start polishing the aesthetics now and leave the minor tweakings for last. This makes a lot of sense, seeing as the whole look of the thing will be altered by adding in extra geometry. It is time for lamp, side table, and some other furniture.

Cones of silence

The cone code took a while to iron into something that looked sort of right, and adding powers and things was necessary to shape it with a curve rather than a boring flat edge. Luckily, JP taught us these things in his infinite wisdom, so I know how to do them! That worked out well.

This is looking very healthy and chunky and mangy. You can start to see the problem with the cone code in that last image though, the tapering bottom is too sparse. Chairs get filtered out if they do not sit on a point inside a defined radius, given their height, but to maintain uniform density it is still picking locations within the whole bounding box, meaning chairs don't naturally fall into the narrow bit often enough. Increasing the density would just add too many chairs in other parts of the cone.

While I was fretting about this, however, a magical thing happened. A certain Miss Eleanor came to sit next to be, and bestow her Eye of Discernment upon my work. Noticing that the spiral was denser at the bottom, and the cone denser at the top, she suggested I combine the two forms. I had actually considered this, but somehow decided against it in my head before even trying it. Somehow when Elle suggested it, it made sense.

And behold! From so simple a beginning, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
That's Darwin, you guys. Isn't he great?

That last one has an incremental rotate on the spiral to highlight itself against the chaotic background, but I don't know if I want it to stand out that much. The spiral also doesn't wrap the cone tight enough. Numbers, numbers, everywhere.

Spirals and tornados

Remember these from 242 Computer Graphics? Such fun we had. I've made it 3D simply by doing the spiral in the XZ plane and incrementing Y steadily.

The first few had angle increments that were much too big, causing it to look more like waving fronds of sea life. No thank you, waving fronds, you aren't quite what I want today.

Here things get proper spirally as I make the chairs follow each other more closely. You can probably tell that I've been using the random rotate function I already wrote to give things a chaotic look.

Testing out incremental rotate was interesting, but not the look I'm after, too orderly.

This is nice, but not really the dense tangle I had in my head. I had a chat to JP, and he suggested a fairly simple method for making cones, so I'll try that next time.

Chair, bro

I'm going to start with a chair model, instance that to get some procedural forms going, then add in additional models (like lamps, tables, a chaise maybe) later.

A chair is born! I can probably optimise the number of vertices, since I used edge loops and extrude from a cube to build this. Also, texturing would be nice. But later, later.

I have many chairs!

I have many randomly rotated chairs!

I have many incrementally rotated chairs!

This is pretty much just baby python though, fooling about to a handle on instancing, moving and rotating. Real math will have to arrive soon.

Project 2 - Environment Concepts

These were designed more as slides, a counterpart to me talking about the ideas, so will make a bit less sense here.

I have chosen to take a combination of the 2nd and 3rd concepts as my starting point, using jumbles of furniture and composing them to draw down to a focal point, impossibly balanced. I want to play with scale also. Experiments await!