My colleague Julien showed me last week a 3d format i’ve never heard of : Renderman.
Renderman, was created by Pixar animation Studio as an Interface specification and a photorealistic renderer. It is mostly designed for high end animations, but stays relatively accessible for who wants to generate and render a still image with simple shaders. Which just happened to be my case.
For diverse reasons i love working on Linux and i was positively surprised to see how many 3d applications are penguin friendly. I guess the stability of the os and the possible customization makes it an ideal candidate for heavy duty computational tasks.
Since it’s not like i was going to render bugs life 4 or The Matrix 5 i needed to find a simple, accessible and free renderer. And after a few tests i adopted aqsis.
So the pipeline is almost complete. The last thing needed is a programmatic tool that would help me creating .rib files. (that’s the Renderman interface format). There is a c library that seems to be the way to go, but i have no prior knowledge of writing and compiling c, and didn’t have enough time left to learn what seems to be yet another project, so here comes again trusty processing.
A few functions later. a rib was born. Then everything was ready for the long trial and error never ending happy accidents series that’s the visual creative process.
b – 100 patches
I think one of the most exciting things in this project and in trying 3d rendering is the ability to work with light in such a quasi realistic way. It almost took me back to the days i was experimenting in photography studios where every stops needs to be carefully calibrated to reveal the nature of the subject.
There was some interest from people on how to visualise wifi nodes.
this is the second step that aims to demonstrate how to parse and simply visualise in processing data harvested using kismet.
Here is a small processing sketch to demonstrate a way of doing so., there is a lot of room for improvement in the code but that gives an idea of the process, as a ground base if you use kismet xml generated data. The result is very basic looking but good enough to have an idea of the dataset :
Bit of a technical note to show a step by step of what i did to get kismet to work on linux with a gps device (a garmin venture hc gps) and output the data harvest as an xml file.
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I – Installing kismet
1 – getting kismet. $sudo apt-get install kismet
2 – configure kismet.
For me kismet.conf was in : /etc/kismet/kismet.conf
This file can be installed in different places depending on your distro. I run Ubuntu gutsy. If you’re unsure to where it might be do:
$sudo updatedb
$locate kismet.conf
open the configuration file as super user : $sudo gedit /etc/kismet/kismet.conf
you should see something like that :
what i changed was : source=ipw2200,eth1,kismet
suiduser=[myUser]
This was on a Thinkpad T43 with this network card:
Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 2915ABG Network Connection (rev 05)
if you’re unsure about what card you have, you can list the pci devices with : $lspci
3 – run kismet:
in a terminal start kismet as super user: $sudo kismet
The only issue i’ve found was that the network doesn’t restart automatically as the card doesn’t like when exiting monitor mode mode. To get it back to work i just unselected the wireless card from the network manager and ticked it back again. Pressed apply. sorted. There must be a command line to do this tho.
3 – start gpsd.
In my case it was connected onto usb port: $sudo gpsd -p /dev/ttyUSB0
Make sure to start gpsd before kismet and it should be all good from there. Kismet will pick it up and start parsing the gps points along with the wireless activity in range.
Invisible Journeys is my first try at data visualisation. I have seen a few wifi geographical mapping, but they looked a bit too technical to my taste. Here, i aimed at a semi abstract visualisation while keeping the ability to extract sense out of the graphics. Below is one of the visualisation showing 4 different journeys. Bigger to smaller rings : London / Vescemont / Belfort / Barcelona.
Each circular item represent the recording of wireless networks along one journey.
The time dimension starts reading from the right then goes clockwise along the main black thick line.
Each successful node recording influences the time line thickness and adds a “pin” onto it. Red pins represents non encrypted networks other networks are the smaller black ones.
Technically i have been using kismet for recording the wifi nodes. Unlike Netsumbler (windows only), kismet dumps a nicely formated xml file for each session. The only limitation i’ve found was that you can’t use it with a laptop that have pcmcia wifi card. Those cards can’t go into rfmon mode (to constantly scan the network).
Once the xml file was created, it was then easy to get all the data into processing using the xml native library.
Next step is to pair wifi recording with gps. The good new is that Kismet seems to be able to handle both at the time.
More images of the ongoing process can be found on my flickr set
Processing sketch made on the train journey between London and Newcastle and Newcastle and London. This is an attempt of recording a journey, or at least a part of it.
On the way out the program was grabing a web cam input pointed at the landscape, then squeeze the camera frame to 1 pixel wide and rotate it through time. On the way back it actually grab only the first vertical line of pixel and apply the same transformations as previouslly. This was to get rid of a moire effect that happend on the first version. nice!
Well, it was fun and entertaining coding on the train and looking at people around trying to figure out what the hell what i was doing pointing that camera at the window all the time.
In the end it looked as i wanted, a bit like truck’s speed recording graph. Truck speed recording graphs are nice looking. A bit like seismographs but circular. I like truck speed recording graphs.
Research for the illustrations for the make art the international festival dedicated to the integration
of free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) in digital arts.
I stupidly haven’t taken any pictures from the final printed result.
All the illustrations where exported to pdf then i did a few color adjustment in illustrator, to meet printing standards. Under linux i unfortunately couldn’t find a vector application that could open and edit the pdf files that processing exports.
The only app i found that could open the pdfs was Xaraxtreme but from there it was impossible to break apart the illustration. Still it was a good occasion to see how fast the vector rendering was on Xara. Thousands of shapes and no slowing down.
I’m not sure what processing uses to export pdfs. There might be something to modifiy at core level so it exports to a more linux friendly format.
Glass is one of cracktux audiovisual piece. Chun used pure data for the sound sythesis. It always amazes me to hear what he comes up without prerecorded material.
After months of thinking i should redo my website followed by a few extra months of procrastination. Finally it is here [insert trumpet sounds] new web site super easy to update thanks to Textpattern.
I first saw this system being used for Marian Bantjes web site. Check her work out by the way, it is simply amazing. Anyway, I thought i’d give it a go and try to resist the wordpress invasion wave by the same occasion. So far, so good! I’ve updated the site with some old work to keep trace of it. Mostly sound reactive pieces.
The quest of the visual interpretation of sound started a while back when i saw the painting “fuga” by Wassily Kandinsky in display at the Kahnweiler foundation near Basle. Few years later i met the dudes from ixi software who where presenting their music softwares. Made in Director back then, it was an impressive work that this duo managed to put together. The interface of the ixi modules could actually have been used as visual display so people could see what happens behind the scene. They have since been a long way and kept on developping their project. I found it really amazing and it gave me the idea i could do the reverse and creating graphics based on sound.
Only problem was that i had to learn how to write computer programs.
For strange2 the first act, i created a very simple swarm system where i could easily change parameters via key shortcuts such
as nodes scale, rotation speed / angles, motion speed, screen “buffer” clearing speed, video input to use as moving trails etc.. It is still on of the most versatile
piece i’ve done so so far. Showing that for a narrative visual system to work, it needs a substential number of parameters and harmonious combinaisions.
Type and images cloud.
Adding some colors for the middle of the set.
The end result : white red and black architectural shapes moving in an organic ways.
