[rroseu]

I’m going through another nodeschool.io elective workshopper on functional programming in javascript. I understand how to work with a lot of the array functions, e.g., filter, map, every, but reduce was pretty confusing. I mean, it was easy enough to understand how to reduce an array of numbers to a single value, but I wasn’t super clear on how to use reduce when passing in an object literal as the initial value of the accumulator. I looked at the documentation, console logged where I could, but was still scratching my head at the end of the night. 

This morning I found this video (no embed though, sorry!), and I think I finally get it. Cheers to that! The whole video is pretty useful, but ~2:50 is what I needed.

[rroseu]

some news: I recently decided to pivot to more of a developer role. in the last few years i’ve been in more of a ux design/research roles but I realized I liked coding more. I’ll still post code and art related things I’m doing though :) 

I’m trying to gain a better understanding of the inner workings of javascript. Today I’m learning more about sync & async and javascript’s event loop. 

I started with this jsconf talk: “what the heck is the event loop anyway?” by philip roberts. Highly recommend this one. I feel like I finally know what’s going on with things like setTimeout (I mean, I knew what it did, but not what was going on behind the scenes) and definitely learned more about javascript’s single threaded nature, what happens with asyc calls with respect to the task queue and event loop, non-blocking i/o for fluid UIs. 

I found another tutorial on high order functions, functional programming with js. Also recommend this one. I’m trying to get better at structuring my code and making it more modular. I think it’s a series, but here’s the first one I just watched: 

After watching these tutorials I was wondering about whether all callback functions are asynchronous - I didn’t think so, but here was a useful stack overflow link for understanding that better.

more later!

[rroseu]

Going through more processing tutorials. I found a great one by Onformative for generating contour maps, which uses the v3gas blob detection library. I’m just using the height map image they provided in the tutorial, but I’m going to mess around with the code and experiment with other maps to see what other cool things I can come up with.

[rroseu]

I’ve been learning node slowly (among a million other things) - anyway, I was getting annoyed with having to restart my server any time I made any changes to my project files. But I just found out about nodemon! Monitors changes and refreshes for you. How handy!

[rroseu]

Playing with leap motion for processing, wondering if I could get a small acoustic app going - not sure how to go about the strings. Potentially vertlet physics? stretchy rope? Need to research more.

[rroseu]

low poly + abstract refraction in cinema 4D

pretty happy with how this turned out! I’m still a beginner, but I can’t believe how easy this was to do. I just picked an image of a nebula to use for the refraction and it turned out really nicely. I started out with this tutorial by greyscalegorilla and keyframed changes in the bucky’s radius.

[rroseu]

I was looking through my old notes from SFPC and our discussion on algorithmically generated texts/novels. Had an idea, but haven’t yet researched other similar work:

+ pick an author or music artist

+ collect data: books, lyrics, interviews?

+ parse text and visualize recurring themes.

+ consider expanding this to create things like - bots imitating deceased authors/artists, algorithmic fan fiction, tests to see if people can determine if an author wrote/sang a set of words... may cross reference thesaurus (e.g., if an artist sings certain phrases a lot, algorithms may build on similar words)

[rroseu]

I have so many processing and openFrameworks sketches from the last year that never saw the light of day.... Maybe I'll post them over the next week. Also been working through code from generative gestaltung - mainly attractors but thinking I should post that as well. But I've also been learning a lot of cinema 4D ahhh just learning so many tools, learning as much as I can. Learning how to use tools often feels like I'm demystifying magic (referring to projects that I find really inspiring) - but also I've found that there's so much power in making your own tools. I want to get better at that so I can make my own magic.

[rroseu]

more deformers! 

twist, spherify, explosion, polygon reduction

[rroseu]

polygon reduced sphere + twist deformer animation

[rroseu]

Continuing C4D tutorials and learning about dynamics, working with rigid bodies and collision bodies. Fun stuff! When I play the animation before rendering it looks fine, but for some reason when I render it the collision doesn’t seem to be working - I think I need to learn more about how to render those settings? Hm...

[rroseu]

I’ve been trying to learn more about motion graphics and have been playing with things in Cinema 4D. Having a lot of fun with it! 

I came across Allison House’s work and am very inspired by her and her work! I think I read somewhere that she went through the greyscalegorilla tutorials and so that’s what I’m starting to work through. I like them so far! I’d recommend checking them out if you’re new to C4D for sure.

This is the first thing I’ve animated with C4D and I’m really excited that it was fairly straightforward and easy for me to follow along. I think it helps I have a little experience with 3D modeling concepts so things like sweeps, rails, nurbs, etc. aren’t totally unfamiliar to me. I also got to play with a particle emitter which is always fun. Crazy that I can just click and adjust a few params and have particles animate - takes me a lot more effort to program that! :)

The keyframing was pretty simple in this tutorial. I have limited experience with animation... I’ve done a little bit in After Effects and at least with AE I can figure out how to adjust tweening but that is not something I’ve seen in C4D yet. Hopefully in the next few tutorials I’ll learn more about that.

[rroseu]

messing around in cinema 4D

[rroseu]

A video posted by Rachel Rose U. (@rachelulgado) on Feb 19, 2015 at 10:30pm PST

Uses the half-edge mesh library (HEMESH) in Processing by Frederik Vanhoutte, and the tutorial that I learned from by Free Art Bureau. 

(please excuse the iphone camera recording of my laptop screen)

[rroseu]

Finished Nicholas Feltron's Skillshare on data visualization with Processing and Illustrator! I was really excited to see a course taught by him as I am really inspired by his work. Check out his annual reports! I like the one from 2013 - the printed version is so elegant.

The final output is a data visualization of meteorite landings on earth. I worked with similar data before and made a visualization for lunar meteorites, but for that one I used d3js. 

Was nice to get back into Processing, I feel like I haven't touched it in a while. The course was really nice, really straightforward + easy to understand. I had no idea how easy it was to export pdfs and edit them in Illustrator like that.

[rroseu]

A work in progress of my first illustration of a face + hair! I'm super happy with how it's turning out so far. I think I'll probably give her pastel hair at some point. 

Man, this took a long time. Hair is so tricky! Not just head hair but eyelashes and eyebrows too. I did this mostly in illustrator, and I'm still figuring out how to work with the brush tool. Right now I'm really annoyed with how many anchors get drawn with it - I had to do a lot of clean up later on to make sure things were intersecting correctly, and I had to delete a bunch of anchors I didn't realize were there. 

I'm slowly trying to figure out a style of my own. I read that it's okay not to worry too much about figuring out a personal distinct style early on - that it'll just happen on its own as you keep drawing and making things. The inspiration for this one is Hajin Bae's amazing illustrations (and thanks to her for her tutorial on drawing lips, I really like how they turned out on this).

My sketchbook looks freaky right now - just a bunch of body parts. Trying to get leg and arm proportions correct, lots of eyes and noses everywhere. Hands are so impossible to me right now. I'm really in love with the way Tallulah Fontaine draws hers.

[rroseu]

Tuts+ Quicktip: Retro Leaves and Flowers with the Transform Effect

Tutorial here.

My sister and I are going to start a new shop for stationery things (posters, totes, greeting cards, coasters, custom notebooks, etc.) so I'm learning a few new tricks. This one was really quick - just learned how to apply brushes and stroke effects to get the stem and leave edges to get that 'retro' edge look.