Little Rooms #3

Continuing yesterday's Footnotes #2 notes: There is of course a downside to saving everything when 99% of that which is saved is not worth saving. I have about 70000 objects saved, half of them are bitmap images. Most of the images are low resolution, and small variations, slightly different shading or framing of other images. It is a good thing that we live in the time of multi-terabyte hard drives.

Now there is a noticeable delay when I start the program as it indexes those things. Housecleaning is overdue. The program has a delete button, and the program has a smart garbage collection mode. It will keep the items in the "published" state and all their dependencies. But that does not help with all the things that are ready but for whatever reason not published yet, or things not ready but I want to return to.

I am in the process of finding those things that I intended to finish and publish, but never made it into the main flow last year.

Little Rooms #2

One feature of the software that I use to generate these pictures is that it saves everything I do. Every piece of code, every parameter set, and every image big and small. Any experiment can be revisited, every finished image can be recalled and used as a jumping off point for new designs.

Is that a big deal? I find is quite helpful. I do not need to decide if I need to save something, and if so what to name it and where to put it. I can experiment with abandon, always knowing I can roll back to and previous state and try something else. Otherwise when I need to drop out of a creative mind space to do some bookkeeping such as saving a file, it is difficult, often impossible to return to the same creative space.

Little Rooms #1

This starts a series called Footnotes. It consists of odds and ends found in the dusty corners of my hard drive.

Here is the first of three pictures that I had prepared for publishing, but never got around to publishing. Little doors or windows peek into little rooms with a lot of detail. I had planned a separate series for these, but I lost traction after the first few.

Messy level three.

Mess level two. Now some of the colored rectangles spill over into adjacent areas.

Back in Affine #9 I liked the colors and the overall composition. I was not satisfied with the details. It was too straight and too clean. I revisited that image, trying to keep the overall layout, but messing up the smaller details.

I have three variations prepared, with varying degrees of messy. Here I broke up the lines, while retaining the shaded rectangles of the original.

aka New Year's Day Morning.

Added sin() function. For the math nerds, not the complex sin function rather the real sin function on the y component. (x,y) -> (x, sin(y))

The non-affine transformation mixed in here is z -> log(z). I also mixed in some jitter.

For the mathematically curious, the non-affine function incorporated in this one is z -> 1/z.

More curves, and not my typical color choice. This is quite far from the starting point for this series. Despite that, algorithmically, it is a small variation on the basic algorithm that kicked off this series.

So, despite the obvious mathematical inconsistency, I am including this one and the next few in the Affine series.

Sneaking in some curves. Most of this is still based on affine transformations, and it has the same mood as the others. So I am going to go ahead and place this in the Affine series.

We are now two weeks into this series, so time for a quick recap. The basic idea is to use affine transformations to tilt, stretch, and shrink lines. Always straight, no curves. Then adjust colors to highlight the "top" side of the line, while leaving the other side transparent. See Affine #1 and Affine #2 for more details.

"Top" is in quotes. For example a 180 degree rotation is a affine transformation which turns top into bottom. So "top" depends on the particular transformaion details.

In the initial pictures, the transformations included rotations of many angles, generally close to 0, 45, 90 degrees. The most recent pictures had only small rotations, keeping things close to the horizontal.

This one has a bigger range of angles like the earlier ones. I have added some jitter like the recent ones to break up the straight lines.

Affine jitters, in color.

Got the jitters.

Now each affine transformation is given "the jitters". Lines are chopped up and the segments are displaced slightly. As before, the color is altered for pixels on one side of the line segment.