tiles – Nina Paley

Resurrected Mosaics

Working on new tessellating animated gif tiles led me to revisit my older tile experiments, and repurpose for website backgrounds. I originally made these animated mosaics in Macromedia Flash 8 for my section of the feature film The Prophet.

I tried recreating the mosaics in Moho, but quickly became frustrated. Moho’s masking is very unlike Flash’s; in fact Moho’s everything is very unlike Flash’s, and where Flash excels at this type of mechanical construction, Moho favors the organic. Rather than figuring it out anew, I fired up the ol’ 2007 PowerMac and dug into my old Flash files. I exported as Quicktime Video with an alpha channel and copied to my less-ancient 2014 Mac Pro. Moho couldn’t read the old Quicktime format, so I exported again as Apple ProRes 4444, dropped it into Moho Pro, fiddled about with sizing, and eventually exported this transparent gif that will permit cartesian tiling even though the underlying shapes are hexagonal.

In the process I discovered this cool website that will generate a “sprite sheet” from your uploaded gif. This would have been convenient back when I was designing morphing tile fabric patterns, but back in those days – the days Flash still worked – I had to do it manually.

Speaking of Flash, Adobe just announced it’s dead forever. Wouldn’t it be nice if they released Macromedia Flash (you know, the GOOD version from before they bought and ruined it) so others could develop it?

Tessellating in Time and Space

I’ve been collaborating with Alex Gleason on a new social media website, and he proposed a background of the animated fish from Seder-Masochism:

But how to scale it up for a full background? The gif above is 1.6 MB, it can’t be any larger without significantly slowing loading times (and eating up data on mobile devices). I thought I could maybe make a tessellating animated gif tile, and so did Alex, but it turned out to be much trickier than I’d anticipated.

In a way, a looping gif is a tessellation of time: it seamlessly begins where it ends. That isn’t so hard:

I actually notice a little blip in the time-tessellating here. Can you find it?

But it doesn’t tessellate in space. If you tile the fish above, you’ll see “seams” at regular intervals. Making the fish line up seamlessly, while moving, required going “under the hood” of the original animation, re-sizing and retiming everything, and carefully positioning and scaling by eyeball. I won’t go into all the details and mistakes, but after some hours I eventually got something that works almost perfectly:

Now get this: it’s under 160 KB. That’s right, less than one-tenth the filesize of the gif at the top of this post; smaller than most jpegs of similar dimensions (360 x 360 pixels). But it covers an entire browser window, no matter how large. Here’s a screenshot showing it tessellating in space:

Yes, you can still find teeny-weeny seams, but at 12 frames per second they’re hardly noticeable.

To see it tessellating in space and time, click the image above or go to https://alexgleason.me/fish/ .

Update: I made a smoother version. Above is 12 frames per second, below is 24 frames per second. This makes it smoother and less headache-inducing, but doubles the number of frames and therefore file size, and the seams are more visible.

Link: https://alexgleason.me/fish/smooth.html

Tricolor Tiles

Actually bicolor + outline color.

Reminds me of the sea.

OK I Lied

I found another way to make bicolor morphing tiles in Flash, that didn’t make it crash all the time. Plus it animates!

Here is the single tile it’s made from:

My Tile Obsession Will Taper Off Eventually

I can already feel it slowing down, which means I’ll have to find something useful to do soon. Meanwhile I wanted to see the morphing tiles as a 2-color map. Easier said than done: Flash crashes every time I try to convert the various symbols making up the outline into “shapes,” so I had to export a PNG and use the clunky old paint bucket in Photoshop. There’s an ugly thick outline I added to close gaps, in order to make said paint bucket work. But at least my 2-color curiosity is now satisfied.

It reminds me of the far-more-awesome M.C. Escher Metamorphosis poster I had in college. And although the thick outline and various other flaws make not-print-worthy, yesterday I made a color version that is:

I ordered a few yards of it from Spoonflower. I can’t wait – once I start quilting this stuff I might get re-obsessed for days!

More Tile Fun

With a few adjustments the tiles can morph vertically as well as horizontally. I might prefer the just-horizontal version, but I’m not sure.

In some ways I prefer the black and white to the color. When it’s just outlines your mind can interpret shapes any number of ways. When a fill color is added they get restricted a little. With additional colors they get more locked into regions.

This is such a good project to work on while I have insomnia. Or maybe it’s causing the insomnia.