Shapevent

Back in 2004 I wrote an as2 program that I called Command Drawing. I never posted it up on shapevent and never really finished it. The basic idea behind it had been inspired by processing and software structures which was a project initiated by Casey Reas - where people like Jared Tarbell and Robert Hodgin were asked to interpret some of Sol LeWitt’s drawings.

I thought it would be interesting to write a program that just interprets drawing instructions like this:

“1000 black circles and 1 large white circle”

… and spits out an image.

I got carried away with the AS2 version, adding lots of strange features that didn’t make much sense… and at some point I just forgot about it.

A few days ago I was at the Moma and saw some of Sol LeWitt’s drawings and was reminded of the project. A day or two later I recoded the basics of the Command Drawing program in about an hour. See some of the results below:

I’ll be uploading the actual program sometime tonight or tomorrow. I just need to get around to creating a simple database to save drawing instructions that people write… so I can see what (if anything) people do with it… will also add a page that contains a list of all the drawing instructions that have been entered…

When I was a junior in college I programmed a small 3D engine using math I didn’t understand. At the time, I didn’t know that I had created something like a voxel 3D engine.

When I began working with processing I learned about voxels through the forums - I remember seeing some great voxel perlin noise, metaballs and other fun experiments there…

Anyway, I was trying to think of a good reason to use a triple nested for loop (for actionsnippet.com) and voxels came to mind. I spent the rest of the day playing around and ended up with some interesting results….

continue reading to see the interactive flash version…

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Only just started messing with pixel bender yesterday. Wasn’t sure what I’d think of it… for some reason I was under the impression that it would be cumbersome and unintuitive … well, that was the wrong impression. After a few hours of playing around and digging through code examples, I was up and running…. and very addicted… Here’s one of the many experiments that I ended up creating:

Click below image to view flash version (you’ll need flash player 10)

There’s tons of pixel bender code out there…. just use google if you want to figure it out. Also, gotoAndLearn has 2 great tutorials to get you started…