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

Final Showreel

Well here it is folks my final show-reel it’s not quite perfect but I’m pretty happy with it but would like to go back and alter it when this is all over.

June 11th, 2008 - Posted in Show | | 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

Cut and Paste

Well today we met at 10am to decide on the themes for our cut and paste style event for our show. We were met with juice, mini donuts and mini cupcakes, way to keep us sweet Mark!!! After much deliberation and quite a bit of fixed voting mainly against me we finally came up with the three themes.
Round 1 : OXYMORON
Round 2 : LOST AND FOUND
Round 3 : IF DOGS COUD SPEAK…

We know have just over 2 weeks to think up and practice the images we want to use. Round 3 is the biggest worry for me at the moment with such an obscure title.

June 6th, 2008 - Posted in Show | | 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

Actions in Photoshop

After having spent ages resizing my 100 odd face images for my double project to the same size i was then faced with the task of cropping them all to make it easier to get the positioning correct in Processing. I was at a bit of a loss as to how to get them all exactly the same size, that was until i found out about actions in Photoshop. After so many years of using Photoshop I can’t believe I didn’t know about this before. Through the actions menu i was able to save the crop action and just hit one button to apply it to all the other photo’s. This handy little feature means that i just managed to save myself hours of fiddly work.

June 3rd, 2008 - Posted in Double Project | | 0 Comments

Worth1000

Can you guess which 3 celebrities make up this image?

I then came across the site Worth1000, a Photoshop competition and tutorial site that’s specialty is facial blends. It was featured on the Daily Mail website because of a competition they were running to create the perfect female by combining the features of celebrities. The way they were achieving these was more like what I had in mind compared to the St. Andrews site. I like the idea of changing the features of someone to create someone who looks completely different. The level of skill that has gone into these is incredibly high and is most probably not what I would be able to create within Processing. Each artists has obviously spent hours to try and get the features to blend perfectly where as I’m not so sure I want it looking so slick perhaps going for a slightly more imperfect look to the way I blend the features. This might end up looking slightly better because it won’t be what people expect and it will be different to what has been done before

June 1st, 2008 - Posted in Double Project | | 0 Comments