U G L Y M A K E R

Gabriel Lee documents the making of a "Pretty Ugly" poster generator. Say hi at [email protected].

[uglymaker]

[uglymaker]

Found in Henri's studio while coding generative posters/catalogs with Mindy Seu.

[uglymaker]

Pixelsorting

Found Kim Asendorf's pixelsorting source code via stAllio!'s Tumblr. Going to try pixelsorting in the PGraphic that I'm waving. Try and get it to produce consistent but random sine waves.

Found an post by Adam Ferriss on a pixelsorting thread on the Processing forums. I'm a fan of his RGB work and its ghostly brightness; funny to encounter his pixelsort code from a year ago.

The current imageglitcher is way too crazy.

[uglymaker]

FINALLY.

[uglymaker]

Some fun stuff: lovely customizable poster by KOMBOH.

[uglymaker]

1) Geomerative; letterspacing failing.

2) Geomerative; letterspacing working but the letters are each drawn as individual shapes, vertex by vertex. Therefore there may be no good way to iterate between the y vertices in terms of their x -- maybe I can put them into an array sorted by x? I won't know how many dimensions it needs to have because some letters have 6 rows of ys (S) and others only have 2 (I). Will think about this.

3) PGraphics; taking each column of pixels and moving it up and down in a sine wave. Problems with pixelization and transparency in PDF.

4) PDF: transparency issues; can't see the blue ellipse.

[uglymaker]

Geomerative & OTF

Note: Geomerative works with TTF but not OTF; thankfully there are plenty of quick online OTF-to-TTF converters.

[uglymaker]

This java example shows how to convert Hue, Saturation, and brightness model (HSB) to Red,Green, and Blue (RGB) model using Java AWT Color class.

Rewriting monochrome function.

[uglymaker]

Monochromer; occurs because array for loading pixels wraps, but image does not.

[uglymaker]

Either use ArrayList and change the structure so I can use .remove() on null images, or use arrays and write my own remove function?

Shorten exists!

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Rewriting image search and placement, trying to debug null images once and for all.

[uglymaker]

Pretty nice. Made with BitmapData.js.

[uglymaker]

Trying to fix image retrieval by understanding Jeff Thompson's code in more detail and iterating through image URLs when an image is irretrievable. More on exceptions.

IOException is the most general and represents any type of error that can occur when performing I/O. Its descendants represent more specific errors. For example, FileNotFoundException means that a file could not be located on disk.

a)

b)

Googler: builds the URL query. Outputs the source to array m and formats input using matchAll(). Then image loading is where it breaks, discovering an image is null & file is invalid. So:

1) Load extra images in array -- wasteful.

2) Go back and iterate offset when loading URLs -- potentially more breaks; also wasteful.

3) Load one at a time and iterate through images; use switch/cases for placement instead of using ifs. This means rewriting the multi-image whole placement function, but it's pretty bad anyway. This is probably the way to go -- will get advice on these or more possible approaches.

[uglymaker]

Final presentation. Photo by Lucas Kazansky. Posters made by classmates using the Uglymaker.

Still many things to fix, but it's working pretty well!

[uglymaker]

Export broken

Exported a second time to test the fonts. Application now shows a grey box and nothing else.

Ref.

It turns out that adding the complete sketch path breaks the application, which makes sense, but adding the filetype ".otf" after the font file name makes both the sketch and app work without installing fonts. Time to test this on other computers, as well as the Windows versions -- currently working on a Mac in the lab.

[uglymaker]

Fonts

Directing to the font path from the sketch eliminates the need for installing the fonts I'm using on every computer, and using .vlws, which don't play nicely with PDFs due to being bitmaps:

Try using a relative path to the sketch(wherever that might execute). There's a built in property calledsketchPath is quite handy for this. You might place the file one level above the sketch path for example:

String path = sketchPath+"/../yourFile.mp3";

it's up to you. To check if the path is correct you could try something like:

println("does " + path + " exist? : " + new File(path).exists());

Another idea is to use the selectInput() which will prompt for the file location. It might be handy to try using the sketchPath() function (which should format a path relative to the sketch) on the String returned by selectInput().

[gnoth]