480 Blog

 The artwork I chose to base inspiration off of was the "Untitled" circular pattern art, shown below. Considering the circles in the art were inconsistently spaced yet also grouped together, I thought I could play around with being able to change the spacing and grouping of circles in my scene. From the start, I also knew I wanted to incorporate the camera in some way - as well as having the mouse change the scene camera perspective to view the pattern in different ways based on user input.  Aesthetically, all the circles in the original static art had varying textures and colors, and I wanted to make those "moving", so I brought in Noise and turned off monochrome to add vibrant colors - and combined that with the video camera in a Composite TOP, which went to a Phong MAT to be sent to the Geometry. I made two circles, each expanded to be their own spiral pattern.  When it comes to interaction, the video camera RGB values from an Analyze CHOP are changing the backgr...

While looking at Charles Gaines' artwork, one stood out to me the most: an untitled colorful piece made from 1969-1972 with acrylic paint on a canvas. It hasn't been seen since 1972, and Gaines would make a squiggly pattern with one circular band at a time to form a circular pattern. I think it's great how minimalist the geometric painting is, and there's plenty of different ways this could be approached in TouchDesigner.  With the theme of a colorful and spirally pattern, making it non-static could involve adding noise into each spiral in the project, or possibly a looping video to generate the textures within them. Interaction-wise, I'd love to make use of the webcam in order to somehow influence how the circles rotate/scale. Using the mouse to zoom "into" each circle to see details, possibly mimicking space as if each one were its own planet, could be interesting too. The simplicity of colorful, textured circles makes it possible to do essentially anyth...

   For this project, I took inspiration from an audio visualizer project in another class and decided to make another song-based creation. I decided on a list of songs for the data - alongside information such as their moods (valence), energy, danceability, and genre - which gave me lots of flexibility in terms of how to visualize it. I knew I wanted to have a control to select songs and decided on a separate control to select the genre as well.    When it came to the experience, I wanted almost a graph of different quadrants for different songs to move to based on selection - happy songs to the right, sad to the left, those with high "danceability" on top, and those more serious/calm on the bottom. I also wanted more ways to represent vibe/movement - the songs scaling based on energy (intense as large vs. peaceful as small), the background changing based on valence (happy as yellow, sad as blue), and noise/movement on the song/shape also demonstrating how "danceable...

 I'm planning to create a visualization based on a dataset of songs. Each song has a variety of information, with numbers to represent the energy of the song, danceability, valence, tempo, etc. alongside the artist, album/song name, and genre of the track. There's plenty of options in terms of where to go with this data, though I intend to have a control selecting the song genre and another to scroll through the songs within that genre - one at a time. From there, I plan on having the visualization of each song, which will be some form of geo shape, varying in location based on the song's valence (happy/sad) and energy levels. How energetic/danceable a song is will change not only the size of the visualization itself, but also how it animates/moves. As you scroll through the genres, genre text and the background color will change. Each song will have the title of it listed underneath, and the minimal geo shape may also change as you scroll between songs. In terms of mood, t...

 For this exercise with the blue theme, I wanted to have a slider that controlled the saturation of blue, and some type of cool texture effect to trigger with a button as well. After playing around with lots of the TOPs, I decided on the Edge operator to outline edges. For the slider, it controlled the Low Blue parameter of the Level operator, which was then sent into the Edge operator to control the shade of blue on the edges. For the button, it changed the strength parameter of the Edge operator.  Network flow-wise, I intended on having the video itself come out of its own container: just the movie file. A level up, that video would get its Level and Edge operators which would be controlled by the slider and button. Another level up, it would be sent to a Null operator and into a content container, before another container would combine both the controls and content. Lastly, it was put into the window. In terms of choices, I chose a video I took on top of a mountain in Vermo...

 For Exercise 1, I wanted to include a playful mood with animals. The videos I selected were ones I've taken on my phone: a squirrel at a park in Rochester and a dolphin at a resort in Hawaii. I knew I wanted to include colors on both videos, so the Ramp operator was needed in TouchDesigner. The overall network flow intended was as follows: Movie File → Ramp → Text → Cross for both videos. Once the videos with text and colors met at the Cross operator, that's when its value would be controlled by a slider.   Aesthetic-wise, I chose a blue color to represent the ocean for the Dolphin, and a green color for the grass in the Squirrel video. I swapped those colors for the text to make it stand out - green for Dolphin and blue for Squirrel. Interaction-wise, I chose a slider because it's quite simple to manually control exactly how far you'd like to go between the videos. The Cross value reads the value of the slider with a Python expression: op('slider1').par.value0...