Don Havey

Well isn’t today just the most amazing day of self-motivation ever. This is project #3 that I’ve uploaded. It must be this new Vimeo account… I’m addicted to sharing video now. Here’s the video clip: Voronoi plateau from Don Havey on Vimeo.

This quick sketch used my Voronoi diagram class to create a landscape of plateau-like structures derived from an image. The image is “chiseled” into a Voronoi diagram, then extruded according to each cell’s brightness. The diagramming process is interesting, the result is… meh. It makes high-intensity images a little more intense… but that’s about it.

On a related note, I discovered that when overlaying a number of iterations of Voronoi-diagrammed images in Photoshop with an exclusion filter, the results approach the original image in terms of resolution. Here’s an example:

Notice that the red image is washed out a bit, but is much more resolved than the others… interesting.

Anyways, here’s the source code (get your own images this time) and a demo. Click to give the applet focus, then use the arrow keys to navigate once the diagram is finished. Enjoy.

I’m sure this has been done before, but after being inspired by Robert Hodgin’s Audio Driven Landscape, I decided to use my new Terrain class to make something sexy and moving.

I’m not sure if I ended up being successful with the sexiness… but this thing sure does move. What I’m doing here is mapping a video on to a terrain, with the terrain’s depth based on pixel brightness per frame. When you load in a movie–taken, say, from a train–you get a pretty interesting warped image. It adds a level of depth that I wasn’t expecting. It also has a interesting cloth-blowing-in-the-wind thing going on (without fancy Verlet integration)…. Looking from near ground level corner-to-corner is the most exciting.

No tutorial on this one, but the source code is here (includes the sample video)… and I’ve embedded my very first Vimeo video below.

A few notes:

• The Terrain class is still pretty young… and not optimized for this type of thing. It uses a relatively slow iterative smoothing function to avoid spikes.
• The points that define the terrain should be eased between new coordinates, rather than just moved. That would make this whole thing a lot less ADHD. It would be easy to do… the easing functionality is already built into the Point class.
• If you download and run the thing, click on the applet to give it focus, then use the arrow keys to rotate the terrain. Holding down any mouse button toggles the display of the movie as a texture map.

Video terrain from Don Havey on Vimeo.

Let me know what you think!