It took me a while, but I finally got around to stitching the Ziz quiltimation into a single wallhanging. To recap, here’s how these frames look in a movie:
Ziz Quilt finished
Category: Animation
Embroidermation: Tree of Life
The source animation (a vector file sequence) was adapted from my short segment for the upcoming feature film “The Prophet.” That will definitely not be rendered in Embroidermation, but the Tree of Life is such a classic, traditional embroidery motif it was just crying out to be used in this test.
In addition to stitchcoding, Theo hooped and ran the machine on all 96 frames, and then he made them into a flipbook.
Because he’s crazy, that’s why. He even crafted a copper rig to cut out the frames precisely, and register them for photography (he photographed them too).
R-G-B, C-M-Y, H-O-R-S-E
All The Pretty Horses
I ran an inversion on yesterday’s horse Traveling Salesman Problem animation:
Again I had to take out a few stray lines manually. Here’s the same white on black:
Yesterday’s negative image and today’s positive image together:
The positive image has only 2,000 points, so it was faster to process. It’s still denser than the negative image (background) which has just under 4,000 points but covers a lot more area.
Here are both with contrast on grey:
and in yellow and blue on magenta:
The Traveling Horse Salesman
I traced the famous Muybridge horse in Flash, exported as a PNG series, processed each frame with the wonderful StippleGen2, opened each resulting .svg file in illustrator, copied back into Flash, removed stray lines by hand, and exported this animated .gif. The manual corrections are cheating and break up the single line I wanted, but StippleGen’s TSP optimizer left more lines crossing the body and legs of the horse than I could stand:
Theo’s going to see if Mathematica’s TSP optimizer with some additional restrictions works any better.
Tupi’s Kickstarter now live
Remember when I pleaded for good Free vector animation software? The Tupi project just launched a Kickstarter campaign and I’m a backer.
Tupi’s strength is its simplicity; it’s great for kids and anyone new to animation. It doesn’t yet have the power I need to produce feature films, but its development is a good thing for all of us. Since it’s FLOSS (Free Libre Open Source), any innovations made in Tupi can be applied to other Free programs, and anyone who wants to customize it can. Oh, and it’s free – you can download and start playing with it right now.