Double Project online

Ok it’s not exactly the whole thing online but an ickle version of it yayayay. It took me a while to figure out how to put it up online because of it calling on the images wasn’t quite sure what order the heirachy needed to be for me to put it up but i got there eventually. Unfortunately because of the sheer number of images i used its impossible to put the full version online so it is only selecting from 5 different imgeas but you can get the idea of it.
You can view it HERE go forth and have fun.

June 22nd, 2008 - Posted in Double Project | | 0 Comments

Double Project at the Show

The last few weeks of stress, problems and hard work most definitely paid off tonight. I was so pleased with the final result of my project the blended face worked so much better than the original blocky effect. I think I got the feathering just right all the features blended into the face about as well as I think i was going to get them. It wasn’t quite as perfect as that of monoface but I think the fact that i used different ethnicity’s making the blending more difficult. For example whenever Aadam’s facial features pop up it looks like someone beat up Matt and gave him a case of severe bruising. The only real problem I had on the night was the sketch had a habit of crashing quite frequently meaning it took about 3 mins for it to load back up again because of all the image being loaded in. I couldn’t figure out why it did this at first but realised it was when people repeatedly pressed the save picture button it was too much for the computer to handle meaning the sketch crashed. I think I should have maybe put a note up or made the save pad a different colour so people knew not to press it over and over again. There are a few things i would have liked to have done differently if I had had a little bit more time. I realised that with using Matt’s face as the background even with female facial features on top the face never looked female. I did attempt to try it with other faces as the background but the features weren’t aligned properly. what I should have done when taking the pictures was to use a tripod and make sure each person was in the exact same position. Another thing I would have liked to do was have more pads so I could change the actual face and possibly the neck and shoulders as well. Here is a quicktime file I made of all the images captured on the night.

June 16th, 2008 - Posted in Double Project, Show | | 0 Comments

Covering the Board

Ok this has been one of the biggest debates of my whole piece. When I was thinking about the shape I wanted for the board the pads are mounted on, I was originally thinking of having it face shaped but at the time I was still going to showcase my circles sketch. I didn’t want it to be specific to just the one sketch. I wanted to have something that was random and unexpected so came up with the idea of fake grass. I started looking into it online but discovered that the real stuff was incredibly expensive and just wasn’t going to be an option i would be able to take. I started thinking of alternatives and on a trip to Wilkinson’s found they sold bags of the stuff thats used to line hanging baskets which is basically dry grass. I then bought a green plastic chair cover to attach the grass too so it didn’t damage my pressure pads at all. Matt then spent about an hour helping me glue it with very strong adhesive which resulted in literal green fingers on our part.

However all was not well Mark said he wasn’t so sure on the covering thinking it took too much away from the piece in all honesty I wasn’t incredibly happy. It was quite late in the day and I really did have my heart set on the grass. Andy and Mark had a discussion and said that since my piece was about identity maybe recreate a bathroom scene because that is where someone looks at themselves the most. I really liked the idea and headed off to Homebase to see what tiles i could find, i was preferably looking for the retro black and white square tiles. When i got there though I hit another snag the vinyl was only available in tile format rather than on a roll meaning it would be really difficult to attach to my board. Really feeling on the verge of despair at this point my dad came up with the perfect solution. A roll of clear plastic carpet protector, which meant when laid over the top people would still be able to see the ‘guts’ of the piece. It wasn’t quite as wide as my board but that was easily solved with black duck tape to secure it and cover the white on the sides of the board.

In the end I was really pleased with the way it turned out thanks to Mark it ended up looking much better than the grass would have. It still looked as interesting as the grass would have and it made much more sense.

June 16th, 2008 - Posted in Double Project | | 0 Comments

A Little Less Feather

OK it’s now currently the early hours of the morning i need to have this finished for later on today so it can be up and running in the show but I have now discovered that a 25px feather is far too large. I know need to go back in and reduce the feather by about 10px because at 25px it overlaps Matt’s face in the background giving him a ghostly double image effect. So here I go again giving it a go cutting up the 90 odd faces ALL over again.

June 14th, 2008 - Posted in Double Project | | 0 Comments

Feathering

Well I’ve now decided that i need to have the facial features blend in instead of just having the blocks siting on top. I think the best way to approach this is to add a feather to the selection tool giving the features a soft edge hopefully meaning they will blend into the background face. I think around about a 25px feather will do the trick for the face.

June 12th, 2008 - Posted in Double Project | | 0 Comments

And the board is finally done!!

Well it has only taken me close to 3 weeks but I have finally completely hooked up my board. It only took a severe lack of sleep to give me the dogged determination to get it finished today. It took me a lot longer than I thought it would but personally I think that might have been the lack of sleep. My board was already made up but I hadn’t added any holes for the wires to pass through so they were hidden from view. So the first task was to have fun with a power drill which probably wasn’t the most sensible thing but I still have all 10 fingers! When making the board I had already planned the exact positioning for each of the pads to make sure there was a even gap between them all. I realised hooking it up was going to be incredibly difficult unless I attached the pads to the board I figured the best way to do that was double sided sticky tape so I could remove them slightly easier if needed. Afte rthat it was the long and rather arduous task of stripping cutting and joining together lots of different wires. Roughly 3-4 hours later I ended up with a full functioning pressure pad board.
Also when testing it I realised that using the term Keypress wasn’t quite right for my piece because when someone stood on one of the pads for a prolonged period of time it cycled through all the images incredibly quickly. I needed to alter it to KeyReleased instead so when someone steps off of it the image changes.
A few images of the carnage I left behind after:

June 11th, 2008 - Posted in Double Project | | 0 Comments

Not So Sure

Looking at the way the face looks at the moment I’m not so sure if it really works as well as I originally thought. I thought it would look a bit more artistic but it doesn’t really work. Certain facial features just overlap the head far too much I think even if I went in and aligned everything it would still overlap. I think I’m going to have to go back and cut out the features again but this time add a feather to the images to get them to blend into the face in the background. Also what I realised from before was that I need to go through the save the images for web option instead purely because there are so many image files to be added to the processing sketch it just can’t handle it.

June 11th, 2008 - Posted in Double Project | | 0 Comments

Abbreviated version

When having the problem with the face not sticking I wasn’t sure how long Mark would take to get back to me, I remembered Mark saying that last year Jason posted his problem up on the processing forum and got answers really quickly. I thought what the hell and gave it a go and it definitely got me results, although not as fast as Mark. The guy on the forum did come up with one more solution though that was incredibly helpful, a way to abbreviate my code. As it stood before i was declaring each picture being imported into the processing sketch on a single line. I had over 300 images that i wasn’t looking forward to all that typing. This is what my coding looks like now.

PImage bg;

PImage[] featLEye = new PImage[89];

PImage[] featREye = new PImage[89];

PImage[] featMouth = new PImage[91];

PImage[] featNose = new PImage[82];

int leye, reye, mouth, nose;

void setup(){

bg = loadImage("mattface4.png");

size(1024,972);

for (int i = 0; i < featLEye.length; i++) featLEye[i] = loadImage("le"+i+".png");

for (int i = 0; i < featREye.length; i++) featREye[i] = loadImage("re"+i+".png");

for (int i = 0; i < featMouth.length; i++) featMouth[i] = loadImage("mouth"+i+".png" );

for (int i = 0; i < featNose.length; i++) featNose[i] = loadImage("nose"+i+".png"); }

void draw(){

background(bg);

image(featMouth[mouth],0,0, 1024,972);

image(featNose[nose],0,0, 1024,972);

image(featLEye[leye],0,0, 1024,972);

image(featREye[reye],0,0, 1024,972); }

void keyPressed() {

if (key == 'n' || key == 'N') nose=int(random(82));

else if (key == 'l' || key == 'L') leye=int(random(89));

else if (key == 'r' || key == 'R') reye=int(random(89));

else if (key == 'm' || key == 'M') mouth=int(random(91));

else if (key == 's' || key == 'S') saveFrame("face-####.tif");

}

What he did was create a floating int variable that meant that processing was able to look for any files with the same name and import all variations of it at once.

June 10th, 2008 - Posted in Double Project | | 0 Comments

Doesn’t Stick

Right I’ve finally got the coding complete I ran into a fair few errors along the way but it finally works out alright. One of the main problems was when i tried to set up the background image of Matt’s blanked out face the facial features no longer stayed put on top they merely stayed there for the second the key was pressed. After some not so subtle prompting from Mark I realised my error before I was declaring placing the image within the keypresses and declaring the random picking in the draw cycle.
void draw(){
background(bg);
leye=int(random(5));
reye=int(random(5)+6);
mouth=int(random(5)+11);
nose=int(random(5)+16);

void keyPressed(){
if (key == 'l' || key == 'L') {
image(features[leye],0,0, 1224,1162);
}
else if (key == 'r' || key == 'R') {
image(features[reye],0,0,1224,1162);
}
else if (key == 'm' || key == 'M') {
image(features[mouth],0,0,1224,1162);
}
else if (key == 'n' || key == 'N') {
image(features[nose],0,0,1224,1162);
}
else if (key == 's' || key == 'S') {
saveFrame("face-####.tif");
}
}
When in fact i needed to be doing it the other way around. Once I had done this it worked perfectly and I ended up with this

.

June 10th, 2008 - Posted in Double Project | | 0 Comments

Droplets

Well after my great discovery of actions in Photoshop i didn’t think it would get any better than that I was wrong. Faced with the prospect of having to use actions to change the image size for over 120 images OK I know it’s only a case of clicking one button for each but that still is damn time consuming. Then Mark showed me the other great thing about Photoshop, Droplets! They harness the greatness of the Action by performing it automatically on hundreds of files at once. Meaning all i need to do is drag the files i want to be changed onto the Droplet and hey presto we instantly have 300 resized images in the shortest time possible.

June 4th, 2008 - Posted in Double Project | | 0 Comments