I have launched a portfolio site.

roberthodgin.com

As I mentioned in a previous entry, I am working on an application to be presented at the V&A Decode exhibition opening in December. I was asked to rework the Solar piece so that it could be audio responsive in real-time.

During the development, I realized my usual habit of listening to music was not going to serve me well. As far as I know, the gallery will not be blasting The Knife throughout the space. I switched off the music and started making beep boop blah blah blah noises into the microphone but this got old, fast.

I put out a call on Twitter for podcast recommendations. A couple people were strongly in favor of WNYC’s Radiolab. I decided to give it a go and man… it is all I have listened to for the last three weeks. Im completely addicted.

I took a snippet from the episode entitled “Musical Language” which features a beautiful soundscape created by Jonah Lehrer. In the episode, Jonah and Robert Krulwich are analyzing the notion that sound is “touch, at a distance”.

Solar rework from flight404 on Vimeo.

Many thanks to Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich and the excellent Radiolab team for giving me so many hours of intelligent distraction.

Find out more about the podcast at: http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/

Hopefully, you will be entertained enough to support: http://www.wnyc.org/support/

Reposted from The Classics Presents site.

Three months ago, Bill and I decided to create an iPhone app. We had an idea in mind and though the idea was most definitely low-brow, we thought the challenge worthy of our efforts. So down into the gutter we climbed to begin working on the app that would become Le Petit Dummy.

Everything was going as planned. We were making great progress. Then it happened. Something entirely unanticipated. The more time we put into developing the app, the more it became respectable. Lo, our gutter-born brainchild was maturing! It sprouted wings of respectability and soared. The depths whence it came were now but a speck. It defied our intent and expectations and blossomed into something magical.

So, what does it do? What DOESN’T it do!

How many times have you longed to see the famous neo-classicist Jacques Louis David sing a scat rendition of Mouret’s Rondeau? If you are anything like me, the answer to that question is easily in the thousands. Well, my friends, long no more…

Too highfalutin? Okay. How about this? You could combine two disparate memes to create something greater than the sum of its parts.

Must go faster indeed! Perhaps you and TiVo want to collaborate to mock someone you saw on a Chevy commercial.

Not your thing, you say? You’d rather poke Kanye in the mouth as he tries to vocalize his innermost thoughts, you say? Be our guest.

Maybe a talking hotdog is more your thing. There’s an app for that!

Got a pet monkey? Does it often misbehave? Wish it could vocalize self-pity? Your wish is granted.

So many possibilities! Le Petit Dummy does it all! Well, it doesn’t do GPS turn-by-turn navigation but maybe we can work that into a 2.0 release.

Le Petit Dummy is available from the app store now. Enjoy, and don’t forget to tweet your new Twitter avatars.

One would think that me being technically unemployed would mean that I would technically have more time to post to this blog but one would technically be mistaken. I have been even busier in the last two months than I was in the several months prior. Doing my own thing has definitely revitalized my artistic efforts. In December, I am showing work at V&A (London), Wing Luke (Seattle), and GAFFTA (San Francisco). I thought I would write a bit about each.

Victoria and Albert Museum

I was contacted a couple months ago about contributing to the Decode exhibition. I will definitely be in good company. Among the contributors are Aaron Koblin, Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar, Golan Levin, Daniel Brown, Daniel Rozin, and many others. According to the site, Decode “will show the latest developments in digital and interactive design, from small screen based graphics to large-scale installations.”

They asked me if I could make a real-time audio reactive version of Solar. I created Solar two years ago. It originally came about because I was working on a demo for a talk I was to give at UCLA. It quickly became one of my more popular works. It features a magnetism and gravity sandbox where particles react to the intensity of the audio. Creating a compelling real-time version is definitely a challenge. The original Solar render probably ran at about 0.5 to 1.0 frames per second. Getting that up to between 30 and 60 fps is not going to happen easily.

Thanks to some great advice from Andrew Bell, I was able to create a robust version that still had a nice visual density but would still run at a good clip. It involved using instances of the parent sphere and child particles instead of calculating a set of particle positions for each sphere. Since I was definitely CPU bound (the magnetic repulsion calculations can get really heavy really quickly), this turned out to be a great way to still show tens of thousands of particles but only need to do repulsion calculations on a set of a few hundred.

Gray Area Foundation for the Arts

Im still not 100% certain what I will be showing at GAFFTA but it will likely be a series of prints based on modifications of the Solar engine I worked on for V&A. I created a tangent project called Moment of Fission. For this project, I place a few hundred charged particles in an extremely small space and then run the simulation. The particles don’t want to be that close so they instantly start moving away from the centroid. I trigger a render shortly after the particles start their rush to expand into unoccupied space. Below are a couple images from the series. More images can be seen in my Fission flickr set.

Wing Luke Asian Museum

The Wing Luke is having a show called Cultural Transcendence. I chose to try and recreate a memory I have of my time in Japan. My father met my Japanese mother when he was stationed at Okinawa for the Air Force.I lived there for only two years, between the ages of 3 and 5. I recall little of that time. My only strong memory is of a trip my family took to Mount Fuji. I remember climbing the gentle slope at the base of the mountain. It was very foggy and the path we took meandered through dense bamboo. There was an old man selling walking sticks from a wooden shack. My father bought one. I cherish that memory fondly.

A couple years ago, I asked my mother about the time we spent there. She laughed and said we had never gone to Mount Fuji. The memory I had was totally fabricated. We were actually in a public park just outside Tokyo. Mount Fuji was visible in the distance. It was not foggy. There was no bamboo. I had apparently made the whole thing up.

In this piece, Mount Fuji always remains far away but looms over the landscape. It is always partially obstructed by bamboo and mist and other weather effects. Sometimes you can only see it because it is silhouetted by the passing full moon. It is a moody piece running in black and white.

Here is some test footage I shot off the monitor. Okay, the wind speed is cranked up too high but it should give you a decent idea of how the final piece will look.

Fuji test footage from flight404 on Vimeo.

Busy busy! I will post better documentation after the pieces are shipped and in place. Im excited for all of them. I am particularly excited for Fuji because I have been working on it for a few months. It is starting to feel right.

I just wanted to leave a quick post about my departure from the Barbarian Group. They put up an awesome and flattering blog entry on the TBG website. I am in the process of writing up my version which includes a stroll down memory lane and will hope to have it posted shortly. I was with the Barbarian Group for over 7 years which is a good 10x longer than any other job I have had. It has been a fantastic experience and I want to extend my gratitude to all the Barbarians. Look for a much more in depth post about this in the next couple weeks.

What now? Finishing up an iPhone app and working on a couple gallery pieces. Busy busy! Exciting times ahead!

My Radiolaria studies were included in the most recent issue of Vague Terrain. Many thanks to Paul Prudence for asking me to participate.

Here is the official press release.

Vague Terrain 14: Biomorph

A selection of artists, architects and writers were invited by guest curator Paul Prudence to contribute work that dealt with biological, botanical and morphogenetic ideas and processes. Vague Terrain 14: Biomorph provides an exotic selection of contemporary computational art, process-based illustration and speculative architecture. Some relevant keywords: “cellular automata, bacterial aesthetics, emergence and genetic algorithms.”

Contributing artists include: Daniel Widrig, David Lu, Emma McNally, Jonathan McCabe, Kat Masback, Marc Fornes (aka THEVERYMANY), Michael Hansmeyer, Robert Hodgin (aka Flight404), Wilfried Hou Je Bek and academic research directed by Alisa Andrasek of Biothing.

View the issue at http://vagueterrain.net/journal14

I’m pretty bad at book learnin’. This fact greatly detracts from my productivity. If I were more able to learn new coding concepts from a book, I would be so much further along in my studies. I prefer to learn by stumbling around in the dark. And here is why…

Going from A to B to C just doesn’t offer the right amount of instant gratification. If you are at all like me, you have bought many a coding manual only to shelve it after a couple hours. Those of us that gain energy from creating compelling visuals will end up feeling a bit sleepy at the prospect of spending a couple hours learning how to print “Hello world.” to the console. I want to learn K then Q then U and V. Perhaps then, I will go back and see what A, B, and C were all about.

It is a battle of opposites. Science versus faith. Order versus chaos. Left-brain versus right. Directed learning versus wild experimentation. The point of this post is to celebrate experimentation. While instruction-by-manual most definitely has its place, this is no reason to ignore your baser urge to just create something pretty, even if you don’t understand how. It is a cycle. Wild experimentation can lead to beautiful and unplanned results which can inspire you to learn more of the basics from a book which will frustrate you into going back to wild experimentation. Over and over again. But with each return to experimentation, you end up building on a more solid foundation. Your work will grow more refined. And more importantly, you will stop pestering Andrew Bell with stupid questions that chapter two of any C++ book would have answered.

Over the years, I find myself going back to the same online resources to learn specific things which one might not cover until chapter 14 of the corresponding manual. I wanted to take the time to share some of these online gems. Some are tutorials, some are resources, and some are just plain confusing, but they have all helped me along my journey and I would like to acknowledge them here.

THE BASICS

First up, Daniel Shiffman’s Nature of Code. Daniel teaches at NYU’s ITP program. He has created some beautiful work and is currently best known for his Most Pixels Ever project. Since I started to get more interested in particle engines and forces, Daniel’s source code examples have been invaluable in getting acquainted with how particle engines and forces should be coded. Highly recommended for those looking for a good place to start.

It feels weird to throw a fairly boggling C++ link so early into this post but it fits with the theme of Basics. Fellow Barbarian Keith Butters pointed me to this page when I was thinking of making the transition from Java to C++. Arguably, the most upsetting part of learning C++ is getting the hang of ‘pointers’. This link will help to explain pointers in a way that minimizes screaming.

OPENGL

Next, the best known OpenGL tutorials on the web. NeHe. The Neon Helium tutorials pop to the top of Google when you search for ‘OpenGL tutorial’, and rightly so. There are nearly 50 chapters of GL wisdom presented in reasonably bite-sized portions. They cover everything from simply opening a new GL view to implementing vertex and fragment shaders. And if JOGL is more your thing, Pepe and Lizzie have posted Java OpenGL ports of most of the NeHe chapters.

Recently, I wanted to learn more about GL lighting because it was something I never took the time to properly learn. I came across this nice write-up by Greg Sidelnikov. He describes the theory behind lighting and proceeds to explore what this means in OpenGL context. A quick but thorough read. Don’t forget to notice that he wrote it while in high-school. Damned early bloomers.

GLSL

Lighting makes for a nice transition to GLSL tutorials. Lighthouse 3D has a great primer for getting started with shaders. They break it down into a very easily managed series of progressively harder examples, ranging from simple toon shaders to more complex directional spotlight implementations.

TERRAIN

Lighthouse 3D also has a really nice series on terrain generation, a new love of mine. Oh, and speaking of terrain generation, Shamus Young has a really good article which discusses the process of going from standard high-vertex grid mesh terrain to one just as detailed but with 10% of the original vertex count. There are no code snippets, just theory, but it is still an engaging read.

Another must read for those interested in terrain generation and population is an article I found over at the Unify Wiki. It is a wonderful summary of the obstacles you will likely encounter when coding your own terrain engine from scratch.

TEXTURES

Of course, when working with these shaders and terrain engines you will likely have a need for interesting textures. I have a few links to help with that. At the top of the list is Filter Forge. It is an application (or plugin) with a node-based graphical GUI which can help you create tiled textures, complete with bump, normal, diffuse, and specular texture generation. If you are looking to learn more about using maps for lighting effects, I highly recommend starting with Filter Forge.

Another competing product is Peacock by Aviary. I have not used it yet, but the incredibly talented Mario Klingemann is behind it so I would guess it is insanely powerful and well rounded, just like Mario himself.

If tiled textures aren’t exactly what you need, perhaps give Turbosquid a shot. I recently found myself in need of a nice photo of wheat that I could use in my terrain simulation. I tried making my own but it just didn’t work well and I had better ways to use my time. Turbosquid to the rescue. Granted, you have to pay for the content and often the content is way overpriced for the quality. But hunt around and you will probably find something that will work fine. Paying $10 for a high-res texture is easily worth it if you consider how long it would have taken to create the same image from scratch.

PLANETARY TEXTURE MAPS

If it is Earth textures you need, look no further than Blue Marble, a NASA initiative. There are some seriously high-res textures of the Earth, some as large as 86400×43200 pixels. The usage license is lenient and the quality is superb. If your needs are more other-wordly, try the planetary maps at Steve Albers’ site.

iPHONE

Finally, for those in need of some iPhone development assistance, I recommend two sites. Keith Peters has posted a nice starter tutorial for those interested in developing iPhone apps. I used it to get started and it was easy to follow and perfectly paced. Once you start making your own iPhone applications, you will likely need to learn more about OpenGL ES (think of it as OpenGL-lite for devices). Simon Maurice has an ongoing series of mini tutorials for developing with GL-ES for iPhone. Highly recommended.

SUMMARY

Hopefully these links will help you as much as they have helped me. Keep in mind, these are not a substitute for traditional book learnin’. Ideally, they will be used in conjunction with painfully boring coding books like 3D Math Primer for Graphics and Game Development, C++ Without Fear, and the Orange Book. Together, they should be enough for you to code your way to heaven.

DISCLAIMER

This list is not exhaustive. Undoubtedly, I have forgotten quite a few folks that have helped me over the years. If you know of any useful tutorial or resource sites, send me an email ( robert@ ). I will start compiling a list for a followup post.

LINK LIST

Basics

Daniel Shiffman

C++ Pointers

OpenGL

NeHe

NeHe JOGL

Greg Sidelnikov lighting

GLSL

Lighthouse 3D GLSL

Terrain

Lighthouse 3D Terrain

Shamus Young

Unity Wiki

Textures

Filter Forge

Aviary Peacock

Turbosquid

Planetary Texture Maps

NASA Blue Marble

Steve Albers planetary maps

iPhone

Keith Peters

Simon Maurice

Been a while since I last updated. I assure you I have not been resting. Unfortunately I am working on projects that need to remain under the cover of vagueness until they are either 1)more fleshed out or 2)officially launched. But that doesn’t mean I can’t tease a bit, right?

The two things that have been occupying most of my time the last couple weeks are procedural landscape generation and population, and procedural plant generation. The landscape project started because of an installation the Barbarian Group is doing for a gallery in Seattle (nope, not the McLeod Residence this time). This project should be done sometime in October. I am going to be vague on the details because there is still plenty of time for the scope to change and knowing me and the way I like to work, it will change. Four months is a long time.

There are some additional test renders up on my Flickr page. In short, you are looking at a terrain mesh based on actual GSPS data from NASA. Many thanks to Kyle McDonald for figuring out how to parse the very strange .hgt file format. His example code is available at OpenProcessing.org.

I have done terrain experiments before but never thought much about how to make them more lush by populating the mesh with plants and trees. Thanks to my new found appreciation for GLSL shaders, I was able to put a nice coating of wind-blown grass onto the terrain, as well as a few thousand trees and bushes.

The water is made of layers instead of a flat plane. This was mostly an aesthetic decision. I just like the way it looks, especially if the camera is lower to the ground as it will be in the final version.

It is interesting to pause here and consider how far we have come since the good ol days of the NextFest grass wall project. That project from 2006 stretched my coding ability as far as it would go. And all for what? A few hundred 2D grass blades that barely broke 30 frames per second. This new landscape has rolling hills of seemingly millions of blades of grass all bending in the wind with cloud shadows and minor dynamic lighting and easily hovers above the 60 fps threshold. Exciting! But thats pretty much all I can say about that until we get further along.

I recently got sidetracked because I wanted to find a substitute for the TurboSquid.com textures I was using for the trees and bushes. I remembered the branching application I wrote earlier this year and decided it would be reasonable easy to recode it to produce plant life.

I was partially right. It wasn’t hard to make the code churn out plants, but it was hard to make it create plants that didn’t look like CG plants from The Lawnmower Man. There was just way too much symmetry and predictability in the growth patterns. I decided to spend a few days making it more robust.

First up, trees. The image below was my attempt to make a believable tree (without leaves). The basic process is to start with a node. Think of it as the seed for the tree. The seed is created with all the behavior characteristics for the entire tree. The seed creates child nodes which pass along the tree’s ‘genetic information’. This information consists of parameters like lengthDelta, lengthDeltaDelta, radiusDelta, radiusDeltaDelta, maxChildren, color, maxGenerations, etc. As a parent creates a child node, it sends this information but mutates it slightly. The nodes arrange themselves in space using magnetic repulsion. Any node can repulse other nodes as long as they are of an equal or higher generation. The node at the base of the trunk repels everything whereas the nodes at the branch tips repel only each other. If you code in some decreasing branch lengths and radii as you go from generation to generation, you will create a nice space-filling tree with no branch overlaps. Sadly, these trees are complex enough to elude a reasonable frame-rate but perhaps with some limitations placed on the number of branches that can be created, and killing off the repulsion after the branches settle into place, they will be swaying in the Perlin noise breeze in no time.

I then tried to place some leaves or flowers on the trees and accidentally changed the perceived scale quite a bit. It no longer seemed like a majestic oak. It turned into a bush, and then eventually, much smaller flowering weeds. I wasn’t put out by this change (bushes and weeds were going to need to be addressed eventually anyhow) so I went along with it and started making bushes and weeds.

The weeds ended up catching my attention the most because I could see a great deal of potential to create amazing unique renders of realistic looking plants without needing to manufacture them on a more traditional 3D application.

I was reminded on Flickr that I am treading into territory that has been explored by countless others before me, namely Prusinkiewicz and Jon McCormack. It is definitely an exciting distraction and I look forward to experimenting further with this methodology.