übertoys
Someone remarked to me the other day that there seems to be a renewed burst of creativity in things fractal-related. Mark has released Sprite; Dave Makin's got some new formulas he's brewing, and I hear rumors of other noted formula authors doing the same. And yes, I've got some new toys too. Toys that let me create images like the above. I did not use an image importer to create it; it's fully resolution-independent and can be rendered at any size. I think it needs some more polish and testing before I release it, though.
While it is very fulfilling to create art, I am one of those peculiar people who finds even more satisfaction in creating tools. Perhaps it's a cop-out; by making a tool, I side-step the inconvenience of having to be artistically creative. But knowing that something I've made can be used by many more artists to do things that I never thought of---well, that's just magical.
I'm going to sleep with a smile on my face tonight.
posted by Damien Jones at 10:04 PM
3 Comments:
Looks very cool! I've been wanting to do something like that for a long time. What did you do--program the outines for each of the glyphs in a set of fonts? Whatever it was, it's cool!
9/10/2006 10:18 PM
That would've been the easy, albeit labor-intensive, approach.
No, I did something else. I wrote a generic TrueType curve extractor and a UF formula to render them. You just type your text into the program and it spits out a UPR you paste into UF. If you're feeling particularly suicidal you can edit the curves inside UF.
9/10/2006 10:32 PM
While I was struggling to import large enough text to get a good result with Sprite I was thinking, wouldn't it be cool if someone wrote a formula that actually drew TrueType fonts.
I enjoy writing tools as well but my motivation is usually that what I feel I need to for my artistic explorations doesn't exist yet. But if I'm making them for myself there's no reason that others can't use them as well (in most cases; I do keep some things to myself). I'd also say that I think of my programming and image makings as single creative process, and not two separate things at all.
9/11/2006 4:53 AM
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