Java &#8211; Tobias Makes Games

Instructions:

Among The Stars:
- Left-click to refresh.
- Middle-click to take 1000 steps and pause.
- Right-click to pause/unpause.
- 1/2/3 switches between velocity/mixed/position modes.
Energy Transfer:
- Left-click to refresh.
- Middle-click to pause and take 200 steps.
- Right-click to pause/unpause.
- A to refresh and finish 200 steps with same color scheme.
- S to refresh and finish 200 steps with changed color scheme.
Deep Into Vector Space
- Left-click to refresh.
- Middle-click to finish the current painting, or a new one if the current one is already finished.
- Right-click to pause/unpause.
- A to refresh and finish a new painting with same color scheme.
- S to refresh and finish a new painting with changed color scheme.
- Space to take a screenshot.
Digital Eye
- Left-click to refresh.
- Right-click to refresh, but keep color scheme.
Once Upon A Galaxy
- Left-click to refresh.
Of Silk And Light
- Left-click to refresh.
- Right-click to refresh, but keep color scheme.
Wipers
- Left-click to refresh.
- Middle-click to draw 200 steps and pause.
- Right-click to pause/resume.
- A to reset and draw 200 steps with the current color scheme (and then pause).
- B to reset and draw 200 steps with another color scheme (and then pause).

If you’re not on Windows, fret not; for some reason I can’t compile for Mac and Linux, but you can just download Processing and open the sketch files. Sometimes you need to add a library, but mostly it’s really straightforward. If you need any help doing that, just send me a mail or comment here.

Generative Art – Sketches #029 to #035

Tobias Wehrum — Fri, 01 Jul 2016 17:35:45 +0000

It’s been over a year since I last posted a collection of small generative art sketches – but that’s not because I stopped making them, I just got a bit lazy with posting. There’s quite a lot queued up now! And without any further ado, here are candidates #29 to #35.

#029: Plasma Blob

This one isn’t terribly impressive, but it was made in a few minutes to demonstrate Processing to a colleague and is reasonably nice to look at.

#030: Mara’s Ocean

A typographic variation of #028: Isles using the Mara’s Eye font.

#031: Chimera Maker: What Has Science Done?!

The sillyness levels go through the roof with this one. For executables for Windows, Mac, Linux and Android and for more pictures, check out it’s own blog post!

#032: Grass Tree

Another ad-hoc Processing tutorial I gave for a ground of friends. This one was a bit more involved than #029: Plasma Blob and looks pretty nice!

#033: Dance of the Fireflies

An experiment with boids/flocking. Unfortunately a little dark-ish, so it’s best observed at night – just like real fireflies!

#034: Living Constellations

Stars float around and form constellations with nearby other stars.

#035: Smoky Silk

Yet another silk variation.

Download

https://vimeo.com/164761168

Instructions:

Plasma Blob: Left-click to refresh.
Maras Ocean:
- Left-click or X to refresh.
- Right-click or C to refresh, but keep color palette.
- Middle-click or V to refresh, but switch colors.
Grass Trees:
- Left-click to refresh.
- Right-click to instantly finish growing.
Dance of the Fireflies
- Left-click to refresh.
- Middle-click to take 1000 steps and pause.
- Right-click to pause/unpause.
- A to refresh and finish 1000 steps with same color.
- S to refresh and finish 1000 steps with changed color.
Living Constellations
- Left-click to refresh.
- Right-click to pause/unpause.
Smoky Silk
- Left-click to refresh.
- Middle-click to take 1000 steps and pause.
- Right-click to pause/unpause.

Into Oblivion: A Music Visualizer made with Processing

Tobias Wehrum — Fri, 29 Apr 2016 23:12:54 +0000

With my newest generative artwork, I embark into the wonderful world of generative/reaction animations: It’s a music visualizer.

I’ve used spectrum analysis (powered by minim) and Processing to make a reactive artwork. It works especially for songs with breaks and theme changes where it becomes really apparent that the result is really dependent on the currently played music.

If you are Windows, you can download it here – edit the default.xml to use your own music, change the color scheme. Check out the readme for the controls!

The source code is, as always for my generative art in Processing, available at the GitHub repository and open source. You can open it with Processing 3 – just import Minim.

Here is a video using a shortened version of Push Every Button by Lapfox:

Into Oblivion (Music visualizer made with Processing) (https://vimeo.com/164761168)

Generative Art – Week 4

Tobias Wehrum — Thu, 02 Apr 2015 20:10:30 +0000

Four weeks ago, I started doing daily generative art Processing sketches – and now I am at the end of this fourth week. I’m glad I held on to the “do one sketch every day” mantra, even when I wasn’t feeling inspired – I made some pretty fun stuff this week. Alright, let’s dive right in!

#022: Tentapus Generator

That’s right – it has 10 legs, not 8! I really like how the legs always look so different. While generating, sometimes it almost looked like it was dancing. I might actually use this in a game one day – it certainly looks like it would be fun to play with.

#023: Thorny Path

A rehash of #022. Looks kind of plant/thorn-like.

#024: Fruity Planets

One of the absurdest things I ever made and definitely the star of this week! It was so much fun generating images and thinking up stories for the different planets. The basic concept of “planet with a radial collage” is taken from the amazing book Generative Design which I cannot recommend highly enough. The original images were dedicated to the Public Domain and are taken from http://creativecommons.photos.

The first of these pictures even recieved a small poem by my friend Marina Bahlke:

With silent steps the tigers try to walk
their applejuicy-drippy paws make stalk-
-ing antelopes way too hard
they sizzle, crackle, slosh and crunch
and before having air as lunch…

…they enjoyed a fine meal in one of the palaces and lived happily ever after.

Thanks a lot! That’s already the second piece of fanfiction I get for making, uh, “art”.

#025: New Emoticons For A New Century

Because the old emoticons were boring, our robot overlords have generated new ones. Rejoice! (What do you mean, you can’t type a reverse F on your keyboard? Get a better one!)

This might not look like it, but of all my generative art dailies, this has taken the most work. I actually revisited it multiple times on following days to add things, like a hat or side decorations. It was fiddly to get right, but I am very pleased with the results!

The font used is FreeSans by GNU FreeFont.

#026: A Handful Of Characters

The title already alludes to it: What you are seeing there isn’t drawn from simple lines and curves, but composed out of font symbols that aren’t necessilary looking like the normal letters of the alphabet. The resulting images are interesting – and what’s more, it offered me an excuseto use my beloved fonts Mara’s Eye, Mage Script and Were Wolf, haha.

The fonts in the pictures are: Iokharic, Mage Script, Mara’s Eye and Visitor Script by Neale Davidson, Magzetician Regular by GrandChaos9000 and WereWolf by GemFonts.

#027: FormWeaver

Another part of the Weaver series (see #09 and #09b), experimenting with drawing faint lines between points. This time, the results look a bit like linen spanned between points and illuminated from behind.

#028: Isles

A shiny sea-with-isles generator. I think it’s a worthy end to my 4-week-daily series!

Download

Instructions:

Tentapus Generator:
- Left-click to refresh.
- Right-click to refresh, but keep colors.
Thorny Path: Left-click to refresh.
Fruity Planets: Left-click to refresh.
New Emoticons For A New Century:
- Left-click to refresh.
- Right-click to lock/unlock a tile.
- Mouse wheel to change font.
A Handful Of Characters:
- Left-click to refresh.
- Right-click to switch between modes (mirror, circular).
- Mouse wheel or +/- to change font.
FormWeaver: Left-click to refresh.
Isles:
- Left-click or X to refresh.
- Right-click or C to refresh, but keep color palette.
- Middle-click or V to refresh, but switch colors.

If you’re not on Windows, fret not; for some reason I can’t compile for Mac and Linux, but you can just download Processing and open the sketch files. It’s really straightforward. If you need any help doing that, just send me a mail or comment here.

And what does the future hold?

I already mentioned that this marks the end of my series of dailies. It’s not because I’m out of ideas and even less because I’m getting bored of it: Quite the contrary on both accounts! The reason is simply that the dailies eat a lot of time that I would sometimes rather spend researching generative art techniques – and that I have several ideas that don’t fit into the daily format. So from now on, you can expect bigger results. Thanks for reading, and please join me next time too!

Generative Art – Week 3

Tobias Wehrum — Sun, 22 Mar 2015 20:25:59 +0000

And thus, the third week ended. It had its hits and misses, but I learnt new stuff and I’m especially content with the three dailies at the end! And now, without any further ado:

#015: Probably a Metaphor for Something

On the other hand, maybe it isn’t. Let’s… let’s just skip this one, okay? I guess it’s safe to say that it didn’t go where I wanted it to go.

#016: Hypnotic Eye

This one didn’t really go where I wanted it to go either, but luckily, sometimes cool things happen while you’re experimenting. The video recording didn’t have a high enough frame rate to show how it smooth it really looks, but I recommend downloading the processing sketch or an executable – it feels pretty hypnotic full screen and with a high frame rate.

#017: Circuits

This one is inspired by a chapter of Generative Design about stitching together simple SVG shapes in a grid to form more complex patterns. I wanted to try making circuit-like images, so I designed my own shapes in Inkscape. Fun, but man, this took some time doing for the first time – the sketch uses 36 shapes, and everything had to correctly align. I like the results though, some parts look really interesting!

#018: Cloudy Tunnel

Another one in the category “I thought this would look better”. It’s kind of like a more boring version of #013 (Fissures). Oh, and it serves as a reminder for me – I wanted to go somewhere entirely else with that, but I forgot my goal along the way because I didn’t keep switching back to my reference.

#019: Insect Generator

Ha, this one is fun! Originally I just experimented with using perlin noise on circle drawing, but then I realized that the results look kind of like insects with the right parameters. While I experimented further, I discovered that a certain parameter makes them look very alien and glitchy. That parameter is part of the sketch now, slowly escalating on each result, leading to a tour from normal earth insects to otherworldly abominations.

#020: Forest of Lights

One of the few sketches where I have a concrete inspiration – this time from the manga Soul Eater. The trees with the light balls on top of it fascinated me, so I tried my hand on generating something similar. It was a bit hard to get something decent looking despite using 2D graphics without cool premade lighting effects and shaders, but in the end a bit of cheating (the tree shading is totally randomized and even though they are reminiscent of low-poly models, they are fully 2D, haha) got me close enough to where I wanted to go!

#021: Gradient Skyline

And the last of the pack! This one uses palettes again to create interesting color combinations, but this time I’ve learnt my lesson and picked them by hand. Also, for the first time: Gradients. And pixel line shifting.

The following palettes are used (and highly recommended): Thought Provoking by Miss_Anthropy, cheer up emo kid by electrikmonk, Ocean Five by DESIGNJUNKEE, fresh cut day by electrikmonk, (◕〝◕) by sugar, Dance To Forget by joy_of_summer, Storming Psychedelia by Bionic Blender, Gamebookers by plamenj, A Dream in Color by madmod001, Hymn For My Soul by faded jeans, Koi Carp and 400 Lovers by Tzadkiel, it’s raining love by tvr, vivacious by plch, antidesign by death—of—design, mai by lovelyrita and Pop Is Everything by jen_savage.

Download

Instructions:

Probably a Metaphor for Something: Watch. Contemplate. Close. Move on and try something else.
Hypnotic Eye: Left-click to restart.
Circuits: Left-click to refresh.
Cloudy Tunnel: Left-click to refresh.
Insect Generator:
- Left-click to refresh (and increase alien glitch)
- Right-click to refresh (and reset alien glitch)
- Mouse-wheel or +/-: Cycle through coloring options
Forest of Lights: Left-click to refresh.
Gradient Skyline:
- Left-click to refresh.
- Right-click to refresh, but keep palette.

And now, once more into the fray! I’ll do a fourth week of dailies, and then I’ll change the format a bit. I’ve got some experience with smaller sketches now, but I wonder what I could do with more time – so instead of daily sketches, it’ll be one or two bigger sketches a week. But for now, you can look forward to the next and last round-up of dailies next Sunday. See you then!

Generative Art – Week 2

Tobias Wehrum — Sun, 15 Mar 2015 20:16:04 +0000

And the second week is over! I had some interesting and diverse results this week. I’m especially fond of the Silk/LightWeaver and some of the results of Stormy Weather look very dynamic.

#008 – Silky Smoke

A variant of #006 (CircleTrails), inspired by this video where Casey Reas talks about the circle collision thing that #006 also uses, but with drawing lines between them. Silky Smoke works in a similar way, but isn’t about drawing a persistent picture and more about the movement created. It looks okay, but I have to admit that I was hoping for more.

#009 – SilkWeaver

Ladies and gentlemen, may I introduce the star of this week: SilkWeaver! It’s not self-praise if I’m praising the results of a program I coincidentally, right? Either way: Aesthetically, I these are the best pictures I’ve created so far. And the complex patterns are created quite simply actually: It’s another variant of #006, but this time, there are lots of little circles wandering and some bigger circles called “weavers”. When a weaver intersects with a circle, it draws a line from the center between the two to the center of the little circle. That’s all the magic!

#009b – LightWeaver

My friend increpare noted that the images made by SilkWeaver are too dark, and yeah – he’s right. So I looked up how to use the additive mode in Processing. Turns out, that’s just a single line – and now my SilkWeaver is a LightWeaver. When you start the sketch, that’s the standard mode – with “m” you can switch to the SilkWeaver mode. You know, if you like Silk more than Light.

#010 – Homage to Mondrian

I guess the inspiration here is quite clear. The variation with the zig-zag lines also looks fine and more interesting than I thought it would.

Before #010 I’ve just randomly generated colors, but I thought that this calls for a few handselected palettes. Luckily, the ever-wonderful ColourLovers has API access! I tried to make it call the API on runtime, but sometimes the call timed out because the site was taking so long to load – so now I’m just using a downloaded version of the result XML.

While I’m content with the result in general, when it came to taking screenshots I wished that I had handpicked the palettes instead of choosing randomly from the ColourLovers top list. Some are really interesting, but others simply don’t have enough contrast. Well, lesson learnt I guess.

(I’m sorry that I don’t have any idea whose palettes I’m using here – they are randomly selected from the top 100. If I’m using your palette, please tell me and I’ll credit your here!)

#011 – Stormy Weather

This one had a long way behind it. Lots of circles attached to other circles, in turn attached to other circles, every rotating. At first it was constantly drawing and resulting in a thing that kind of looked like an ugly ball of wool. Changing it to motion blur led to the results below – much more dynamic-looking!

#012 – Calibrating, Please Wait

“Calibrating, Please Wait” got its name because it reminded me of how zooming/targeting display are sometimes displayed on TV – as if it was trying to get the right settings, but they are never quite right.

#013 – Fissures

Again, lots of little lines, rotating and moving, with additive blending. I guess I’ll have to experiment further with that technique as it always seems to have interesting results. In this case, it kind of looks like a very old scratched glass panel (or shard of ice) with fissures and light shining from the other side.

#014 – Noisy Forms

Last one! Polygons with 3 to 8 points and a random rotation determined with perlin noise according to the polygon radius. Not the most glorious way to finish the week, but I guess there are good and bad days, eh?

Download

Instructions:

Silky Smoke: Left-click to refresh. Right-click to switch between white/color modes. +/- keys or mouse wheel to change hue.
SilkWeaver: Left-click to refresh. Right-click to pause/resume. “m” to change blending mode (Lightweaver [default] or SilkWeaver)
Homage to Mondrian: Left-click to refresh. +/- to change speed. 1 to 9: Set scale. i: Switch between drawing or instant. s: Switch between straight or zig-zag.
Stormy Weather: Left-click to refresh. Right-click to pause/resume.
Calibrating, please wait: Left-click to refresh. +/- to change speed.
Fissures: Left-click to refresh. Right-click to refresh and draw instantly.
Noisy Forms: Left-click to refresh.

And that’s it for the second week. Considering how small the results look, it’s surprising how taxing it can be to actually do a sketch a day (and to make videos, pick screenshots and do all the other things needed to publish the results). But I’ll keep at it at least for four weeks in total – some days where I felt particularely uninspired, like on the days I made Stormy Weather or Fissures, still had great results. The “I have to sit down and make something” now is a great if somewhat uncomfortable cure to “I feel uninspired”, apparently. Either way: See you next week!

Generative Art – Week 1

Tobias Wehrum — Sun, 08 Mar 2015 20:55:30 +0000

Hey! If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, by now you’ve probably noticed that (true to my tagline) I mostly post games that I make – but sometimes, it’s also other stuff. The “other stuff” might get a bit more company from now on! I’ve been getting into generative art, and I’ve decided to make one generative art sketch per day until I get bored with it. Every Sunday I’ll post the results of the week with screenshots, videos, executables for Windows and the processing source files. And if you’d rather see me making games, don’t worry – making interesting and potentially beautiful things with code will only help making my games look better. And now without further ado, I present to you week 1!

#001 – ShardSphere

First one in my daily series! Mostly inspired by Generative Art Chapter 5. I really like the beginning when it comes to life out of nowhere.

#002 – ShardCircle

A rehash of #001. I was wondering how it would look in 2D. Turns out: Pretty good. Even more as in #001 I like the how it appears with a swoosh like a swarm of little shards.

#003 – TriangleChain

Things don’t always look like I envisioned them, and #003 is a very good example of this. So along the way I thought if it doesn’t want to look like I want it to, I’ll just add silly perlin noise motion to it and call it a day. (Perlin noise is SOOOO good.) You might notice that it has much clearer colors than #001 and #002 – here I discovered the joys of the HSB color mode.

#004 – CubeSphere

Originally inspired by this crazy thing. To keep the color scheme interesting but also fluent and consistent, I have 4 different functions: “noise(sin(angle t))”, “noise(cos(angle t))”, “noise(cos(angle t) + sin(angle t))” and “noise(sin(angle s)) * noise(cos(angle t). I generate 4 random weights at the beginning to set how each of those functions contributes to the color at the angle t and s. Voila: Different patterns and colors, but consistent and flowing into each other.

#005 – Fireflies

This is the one that strayed furthest from its inspiration, and all the better for it. Because gosh, does it look good, and it looks even better in motion. And it’s fun to play with too!

Originally, I was inspired by a scene in the Rule-of-Cool-anime Campione: Lots of flying swords acquiring a target at the same time and then flying towards it. Turns out that looks really boring in 2D without great graphics and sound effects, but the trails looked nice. And it looked even more interesting with colors and just as little glowing dots.

And so, one by one, I arrived at some sort of space fireflies harvesting white orbs for light, always flying, piercing, glowing and looking out for the next one.

#006 – CircleTrails

This one started out as me rewriting an example from Generative Art Chapter 6 without reading the code and only reading the description. It looked delightfully different, and with the addition of different modes (black, greyscale and color) even more so.

The chapter’s title is “Emergence” – having complex forms and behaviour emerge from much simpler behavior. And so, in CircleTrails, there are lots of invisible circles just flying around and bouncing off the borders. Those aren’t the circles that you can see in the images – those are drawn whenever two invisible circles intersect with the center point as the circle center and the distance as the circle radius.

#007 – Blobs

Last one of the first pack: A collection of blobs, fighting for dominance. It’s not working out very well for them, but more so for us as we get to enjoy the results. Over time, the images feel a lot deeper and richer textured and get an oily look.

Download