The code above is using Away3D 4. I’m using the ‘LinearExtrude’ class for the height component of the object, and standard Plane primitives for the caps. The caps have a bitmap texture with transparency on them, which I have generated at the same time as the height component. A bitmap cap has the advantage of having a significantly lower polygon count than a tessellated extrusion cap, particularly for more complex objects, but has the disadvantage that the engine can’t do the same object culling with the cap triangles – because some of the faces are transparent, it has to draw everything that might be behind one of these planes in order to make sure that an object isn’t being incorrectly missed out.  Another downside is the resolution of the cap texture – you can see when an object is too close or when the angle is too oblique that the polygon cap is slightly blurry and doesn’t quite match up with the height component. It’s not perfect, but it’s working well enough to keep going with.

I’m really pleased with how Housifier’s behaviour is working out. It’s tremendously satisfying to see the parts that will obviously fit together to make a working object. Something I read recently made me think that I won’t want to include such a prominent view of the pieces at all. After reading James Bridle’s post on the fact that book publishers are promoting the wrong things, I realized I was promoting the wrong things, too. It’s nice for end users to know that the engineering logic exists, and they may even feel clever for being able to make sense of the pattern. Ultimately, though, they’re more invested in what it’ll be like to have a shelf in their house, what they could put in it and what it’ll look like on their desk. I made a quick model of a bedroom scene to place a shelf in. It definitely proves the point.

Even without filling up the scene with much detail, the mock-up makes the point of the system clear. You can imagine what it’d be like to have it in your hands as a final product. Imagine if you could resize the shelf while it’s on a desk, and put the junk on the table into the cubbyholes. You could even place the simulated shelf in a picture of your real room to see how it fit in with your décor. The prospect of being able to make an app like that is thrilling, but also means starting again with the interface!

Usage: Move the mouse around in the flash window to rotate around the model as it assembles. 

Not a full-blown facebook app, but it is certainly entertaining – I’d love to see what you make with this one too!

Note: To use the smudge brush, click and drag in the direction you want to smudge in. For the pinch/bloat brushes, you can just click. They also work better at a larger size. Have fun!

I’m still working on Housifier, and one of the things that Stage3D is going to make available is detailed ‘normal maps’ . Normal maps are used by modern graphics cards to fake a higher level of detail on 3D models by changing the apparent angle, or ‘normal’, of an object’s surface.  I want to use this system to generate better textures for the materials that Housifier can use. Because Ponoko has so many materials on offer – and are updating their catalog continually- I need to be able to generate normal maps automatically in order to keep up. The math required to generate these maps is simple, but involved. In working it out, though,  I remembered that a 2D Displacement Map uses a very similar set of rules to generate distortions. On top of that, a number of discussions about Kaleidoscoper have ended up on the subject of a Displacement map-based solution, particularly for the funhouse mirror-like modes. I thought I’d give it a try and the result is what you see before you.

My question to you, the still-interested reader, is this: would you want this integrated into Kaleidoscoper? Is the app authorization process for Kaleidoscoper too demanding? Let me know in the comments below!

Knowing that it’ll work is still qualitatively different from seeing it work, though. Having the object in hand, and knowing that it was produced from an almost totally automated process is fantastic. I say almost because the part of the process where the shapes are packed into the minimum dimensions possible is not yet complete, but little by little the pieces are falling into place – not unlike the animation above!

A note on using Unity3D to view this: My apologies! I actually had this animation ready almost a week ago, and have been struggling with various conversion process from Blender and other applications through to either Away3D (broomstick) in Flash or some kind of webGL-based display. I could push through static geometry, but neither framework seems to have support for an animation format that I could find. If anyone has succeeded in converting Blender animations into something for Away3d Broomstick or any kind of webGL framework, I would love to hear from you!

UPDATE: I have replaced the Unity file with a Unity-produced SWF file! the down-side is that the files are relatively large, because the engine binaries are effectively packaged inside the swf. I look forward to playing around more with what can be accomplished with it!

Summary: This is for designing boxes and printing out the plans for them. The white frame is an A4 page. Follow the help in the app if you’re confused. Enjoy!

I really like playing with computers and finding out what they can do. Between the power of a modern machine and the wonder of the Internet there’s a vast array of possibilities. But ultimately, if a computer’s outputs are only a monitor and some speakers, all we can do is make coloured pixels or make some sound. That’s starting to change, though. People have built machines that can take a design from the computer and ‘print’ the finished object out of materials in the real world. On top of that, there are services like Ponoko and Shapeways. They take your design, print it out and post it to you for the cost of the manufacture and shipping. If you want one of these machines for yourself , there are even free designs available for the Makerbot and the DIY lil’ CNC, so it’s possible to dabble in the field without sinking tens of thousands of dollars into equipment.

One major point that this movement fails to take into account, though, is that Time Is Not Money. Not quite. That’s why when you offer a service to the public and they ask how much it costs, you need to think about the cost in minutes as well as in dollars. While digital fabrication opens up amazing possibilities, people still need to understand quite a lot in order to do anything useful with it. That takes the kind of time that a lot of people don’t really have. Even if fabrication costs can drop into the single digits of dollars, it’ll only be ‘cheap enough to use’ when the time it takes to put together an order can be measured in minutes instead of days.

Introducing Housifier

That’s why I’m building Housifier, a website and a set of tools to make the act of creating designs as easy as it can be. Toward that end it’s still an experiment – there are trade-offs between control and simplicity, striking a balance between Do As I Say and Do What I Mean. The first app will be a close relation of the box maker on this page, but it’ll allow you to make snap-together boxes like my Arduino enclosure – from there I’m hoping to get more elaborate shapes composed, though some of the math is a little difficult. It’s going to be fun!

Note: For large images, click+drag on the picture to move around.  While you’ll only see a portion of it here, hitting the ‘Save JPG’ button will export the entire picture.

I’m not the first to make a fur generator in Flash – Andre Michelle, Mark Knol and a bunch of others have already made some – but it was fun to make and I could see it being useful for generating fur textures for creatures, or making an application that would let you draw hilarious moustaches on your friends. As with the Sequencer , it’s surprising what kind of performance you can get out of Flash these days!

Oh, one thing that was extremely frustrating and somewhat silly: I had to use Thibault Imbert’s custom JPG decoder because of the security sandbox that the latest Flash player throws up around images loaded from external sources.  It’s possible to load and display them, but any programmatic attempt to access, say, pixel values, will result in an error that can’t be sidestepped.  It was a point of some frustration, since if I can see the picture, I want to be able to play with it!  Please correct me if I’m wrong, by the way – if anyone knows how to get pixel values from uploaded pictures in AS3/Flash 10+ I would be very grateful to hear!

This is a demonstration of what it looks like – just in case you can’t see:

(courtesy of Mr. Aidan Fraser of Shide and Prame)

After my tinkerings with sound output and processing, my Friend Aidan got inspired to embark on a more ambitious project of creating a simple music sequencer and invited me to participate.  A large portion of our free hours since then have been devoted doing that.  We’ve been really impressed – even without particular attention to efficiency, it seems that even Flash can take pretty much everything we throw at it!

Both have us have tinkered around in music sequencers for over a decade  now.  We started with ReBirth RB338 and Jeskola Buzz, so we’re very familiar with the expectations for what needs to go into this type of app.  It has been fascinating to shift from simply using a sequencer to considering how it should actually work!  There are so many questions around application design that have remained theoretical until now, where we’ve run across them almost by accident. There are some questions that are much harder than they would first appear – When something is a dial vs. when it can be a slider, how to guide a user through the most important feature of an application etc.  Other things that people often get wrong are laid bare as lazy mistakes – Load/Save effects and a failsafe when the application gets too processor-intensive, say.

Anyway, do not be fooled by its sleek, refined appearance! This application is very much a work in progress, and part of the fun of working on it is deciding what happens next.  If you have any ideas, let us know!

(this is what it should look like)

Warning: Setting the squareness below 0 will result in a much louder sound than anything else, so be aware that you might need to turn the volume down!

I’ve been reading a textbook called Human-Computer Interaction. It’s an excellent and extensive primer on the subject for someone who hasn’t studied it formally in the past, although at nearly 8 years old it can’t be expected to be up-to-date on everything in the field. At first I thought that one of those areas was the use of sound in HCI, though when I thought more about it, I realized that sound is almost always an afterthought – in games, and especially in applications.

One of the reasons that sound-based UI isn’t explored more is that an interface that uses pre-recorded sound samples is limited in the number of ways that those samples can be used to convey information. Sound can be generated on the computer, though, so I decided to look at where more fine-grained feedback could be given to a user through sounds that can be modified at will to reflect even minor changes. In order to do that I had to put together a system that would be able to generate a wide range of sounds that can take a range of parameters, and what you see before you is the initial result of that exploration. Source code can be provided if desired. I’m hoping to use this generative sound output in the near future – stay tuned!