Retro grain with Blender EEVEE

Blender 2.8 is in beta for a while so it’s about time for me to catch up and to get to know the new renderer EEVEE. I started tonight with a simple grain shader which gives the impression of a dot art style. It’s a pretty simple node setup, in general it’s like a toon shader but with the power of an additional voronoi texture. It’s really impressive to see these huge steps made in the latest development of blender but this will be a topic for it’s own in another post. For a tutorial on this shader check out this video!

Cellular automata in Processing

I am experimenting with cellular automata behaviours in Processing…computation took some time so this is just a quick time-lapse recording made with my iPhone rather than exporting single frames and converting them to hight quality video.

 

Cell[][] _cellArray;

int _cellSize = 2;
int _numX, _numY;

void setup()
{
  size(256, 256);
  _numX = floor(width/_cellSize);
  _numY = floor(height/_cellSize);

  frameRate(60);
  strokeWeight(0);

  restart();
}

void restart()
{
  _cellArray = new Cell[_numX][_numY];

  for (int x = 0; x < _numX; x++)
  {
    for (int y = 0; y < _numY; y++)
    {
      Cell newCell = new Cell(x, y);
      _cellArray[x][y] = newCell;
    }
  }

  for (int x = 0; x < _numX; x++)
  {
    for (int y = 0; y < _numY; y++)
    {
      int above = y-1;
      int below = y+1;
      int left = x-1;
      int right = x+1;

      if (above < 0) above = _numY-1;
      if (below == _numY) below = 0;
      if (left < 0) left = _numX-1;
      if (right == _numX) right = 0;

      _cellArray[x][y].addNeighbor(_cellArray[left][above]);
      _cellArray[x][y].addNeighbor(_cellArray[left][y]);
      _cellArray[x][y].addNeighbor(_cellArray[left][below]);

      _cellArray[x][y].addNeighbor(_cellArray[x][above]);
      _cellArray[x][y].addNeighbor(_cellArray[x][below]);

      _cellArray[x][y].addNeighbor(_cellArray[right][above]);
      _cellArray[x][y].addNeighbor(_cellArray[right][y]);
      _cellArray[x][y].addNeighbor(_cellArray[right][below]);
    }
  }
}


void draw()
{
  //if (millis() % 5 == 0)
  //  restart();

  background(200);

  for (int x = 0; x < _numX; x++)
  {
    for (int y = 0; y < _numY; y++)
    {
      _cellArray[x][y].calcNextState();
    }
  }

  translate(_cellSize/2, _cellSize/2);
  for (int x = 0; x < _numX; x++)
  {
    for (int y = 0; y < _numY; y++)
    {
      _cellArray[x][y].drawMe();
    }
  }
}


////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

class Cell {
  float x, y;
  float state;
  float nextState;
  float lastState = 0;

  Cell[] neighbors;

  Cell(float ex, float why)
  {
    x = ex * _cellSize;
    y = why * _cellSize;

    nextState = ((x/500) + (y/300)) * 14;

    state = nextState;
    neighbors = new Cell[0];
  }

  void addNeighbor(Cell cell)
  {
    neighbors = (Cell[])append(neighbors, cell);
  }

  void calcNextState()
  {
    float total = 0;
    for (int i = 0; i < neighbors.length; i++)
      total += neighbors[i].state;

    float average = int(total/8);

    if (average == 255)
      nextState = 0;
    else if (average == 0)
      nextState = 255;
    else 
    {
      nextState = state + average;

      if (lastState > 0)
        nextState -= lastState;
      if (nextState > 255)
        nextState = 255;
      else if (nextState < 0)
        nextState = 0;
    }

    lastState = state;
  }

  void drawMe()
  {
    state = nextState;

    fill(state);

    rect(x,y,_cellSize, _cellSize);
  }

}

Cheat sheet for Paper by Fifty Three 

If you’re using the amazing app “Paper” on your iPad, then this is a must read. Bas van den Broek gives a ton of good tips on how to achieve the most while using Paper. You can grab your free copy right here!

My challenge for 2015 – One sketch a day!

I suck at drawing. Really, it’s that bad. You could give a pencil to a two year old and get more out of it as I would. I wanted to draw better for so many years but never really started to improve something. So why not try it by setting a personal challenge for the new year? I think that’s a good idea to motivate myself to finally improve my drawing skills (at least a bit). There is no certain goal for this challenge, I hope my abilities to draw what I see (or think of) will improve by a huge amount if I just draw…So  I did not set any specific rules, except one: draw one sketch a day, regardless how!

In the moment I think most of the sketches will be done on iPad with one of my favorite drawing apps: Paper or ProCreate. Check them out if you don’t know them, these are brilliant pieces of software! I will post every image on my blog with slight edits in Pixelmator at max. Since the year is already some days old I will try to catch up some sketches, if I don’t get it the challenge will last as long as I’ve got 365 unique sketches.

Okay, now let the sketching begin!