For this year’s Creative Review Annual cover, together with Nexus Interactive Arts, Minivegas created a custom application to draw a letter ‘A’ using content from the CR’s website and Twitter feed over the past year.

We decided to make an “A” from CR’s prolific online output. We felt that its form should be implied, discernable by its physical influence on elements from CR’s blog and twitter content. Some of our early efforts were a little abstract, but we settled for wrapping thousands of strips of tape in the loose shape of the “A”. The strips would contain words and pictures from the blog. Using recent blog activity doesn’t cut it for an annual, so with “a little wget magic”, we slurped every article and image from the last year. We got 10,000 unique proper names and places, hashtags and usernames, and about another 5,000 pictures. That’s a lot, even for six images, so the number of comments on a blog post became a metric for how “big” a story and its content ended up in the final image (like a “tag cloud”). To add some dynamics, we ran the scene as a cloth simulation to blow our strips around a bit. Exploding the letter is fun, though in the end the shapes looked a bit messy so we toned that down a bit. Final snapshots of strips in motion were exported for a high-quality render.

You can download the app and have a go yourselves. The app allows various aspects of the image to be adjusted before a final render is downloaded. These include animation properties such as turbulence, vortex, attraction, damping nd stiffness. In addition, the app also includes .OBJ exports allowing the team to import into Maya together with textures and render out with better lighting and shadow effects. The twitter text version was then used for the front cover whereas the images from the site were used for the back cover.

The app was created using MiniVegas’ own proprietary C++/OpenGL framework code-named Atlantis.  The tool itself is a set of user interface components suitable for the rapid assembly of artist tools, which together with a persistent data and parameter system allows artist and programmer to work together on shaping the project’s look without needing to hard-code everything. It is developed and maintained as cross-platform, running on OS X and Linux. In the future they plan to port portions of it to mobile platforms such as iOS and Android.

Read more about the Annual project on Creative Review’s website or Minivegas’ Project Page. For more information on the Atlantis frameworks see here.

Credits
Production: MINIVEGAS / Nexus Interactive Arts
Producer: Beccy McCray
Coding: Dan Lewis / MINIVEGAS
Creative direction: Luc Schurgers / MINIVEGAS
Art direction for CR: Paul Pensom

Whilst a large number of visual artists are focused on large scale projections, it is refreshing to see when individuals explore possibilities of small objects, something tangible, seeing what is possible and what does it all mean.

Such is the work of the work from David Hall‘s studio class in IDAS Hongik:

Each artists developed low polygon forms from basic primitives and through a series of deformations and replications produced a structure with minimal data in Maya.These structures where then developed (made planar) in order for them to be printed two dimensionally.

This enabled the surface to be re-constructed backto its original 3D form. As the object exists in 3D in both digital and analogue form this allows us to project animations and graphic back onto the object from the digital version with relative accuracy. In effect the form exists in digital and analogue spaces simultaneously.

The result is this wonderful window installation at the corner gallery, Samchung Dong, Seoul, Korea.

More images on Opi@te’s flickr photostream + see the process video at the bottom of this post.

See also Dualism [Cinder, Objects]

Qubicle is a standalone Windows software for creating 3D pixel-art. It combines standard 2D image editing tools with a powerfull function-set for editing 3D cube-matrices. We first wrote about it in October last year and have just received an email from the creator, Tim Wesoly, notifying us that Qubicle is now available for download (Public Beta v 9.502)!

What’s included:
Standard Image Editing Tools
The tools used in the Qubicle Constructor are familiar to users of common image editing tools like Adobe Photoshop. The pencil, the eraser, the paintbucket and other well known tools are used to “draw” the model on a 2D canvas or to sculpt it in 3D. It’s easier to learn and use than conventional 3d modelers based on polygonal meshes. And the models you create have a very original look and that retro touch we all love.

Powerfull Function-Sets for Matrix-Editing
In addition to the familiar tools, Qubicle Constructor owns many helpful functions like interpolated scaling, mirroring and texturing.

File exchange with other 3D Applications
Qubicle Constructor can export models as OBJ. OBJ can be imported by most third party 3d applications on the market. It also reads and writes the exchange Format QEF for a seamless transfer of cube models between the Qubicle Constructor and the Qubicle Maya Plugin.

More info + download at minddesk.com

Previously: Qubicle [Windows]

Qubicle is a standalone Windows software for creating 3D pixel-art. It combines standard 2D image editing tools with a powerfull function-set for editing 3D cube-matrices.

The tools used in the Qubicle Constructor are familiar to users of common image editing tools like Adobe Photoshop. The pencil, the eraser, the paintbucket and other well known tools are used to “draw” the model on a 2D canvas as well as in 3D. In addition to the familiar tools, Qubicle Constructors owns many helpful functions like interpolated scaling, mirroring, texturing etc. for matrix manipulation.

The Qubicle Constructor can import Bitmaps from files or directly from clipboard. Bitmaps can be interpreted as heightmaps to create organic models or imported as sequence to build a model slices by slice. Qubicle Constructor can export models as OBJ. In addition, thanks to the plugin for Maya, It also reads and writes the exchange Format QEF for a seamless transfer of 3d Pixel-art between Constructor and Maya.

You can find our more info, download the application and see more awesome examples and tutorials for Qubicle on minddesk.com

Continue reading.... Maya – Dynamics [Tutorial]

Continue reading.... Maya – Animation [Tutorial]

Continue reading.... Maya – Rendering [Tutorial]

Continue reading.... Maya – Modeling [Tutorial]

Continue reading.... Maya – Interface Overview [Tutorial]