I have recently released at inércia Demoparty, a gift i made for Sue. It started as a christmas gift that would express myself and ofcourse keep me from following everybody else to the local shop and spend my money on something  made by others.

There is no executable this time, as i don’t know if i can spread the music, still, nobody can stop me  (for the moment) from giving you a video. So here it is, Float.

Grazing Jellies is an augmented reality project i had the pleasure to work in. I made team with Neil Mendonza and Hudson-Powell, commissioned by the Abandon Normal Devices festival. Grazing Jellies takes place in a forest, a realtime portal into a colorful dream-like world of jelly creatures. The creatures were created to react to movement of the ambient/people and can also be called by making noise, When nothing is going on they wander around the world and hunt for food. My work on this project was mostly about the jellies generation/animation/rendering.

At first, there was the idea to use metaballs for the creatures, we wanted to give this jelly surfaces some wobbling/round forms. After some testing we decided not to, as i did not see any advantage specially in performace,  so we went with a more “traditional” method.  The creatures were generated from 2 steps. The body and the head.

The body: Create a skeleton line and generate a deforming cylindrical body from the line. After some time and tweaking the body right. After just had to start playing with values to get the animation going. Some trig + using creature’s motion parameters worked just fine, we got it right, but, there was still a problem, the creature’s heads. The head: Well i tried different methods, interpolating the body’s end with some spherical shape wish ease on, but it did not work out. The head textures just didn’t look good, “pinched” as Jody said several times.  We ended up creating the head as a second step, building an hemisphere and then “attaching”  it to the body’s end. Good news is later on, it came handy, as it made things alot easier to map the head’s texture. Some things just come handy sometimes. I had to tweak a bit to get the head and body animation get along, but in the end it turned out to look pretty good.

As for the lighting side, a kind of “ambient light” + phong lighting + cubemap reflections made it to the final version.

This is an awesome project and i really enjoyed working with the team. As said before this should not be a closed project, it was projected to live and change so it can fit other ambients, so expect to see more from the *mighty* Grazing Jellies.

Some videos on the development blog.

Full article on the festival @ Wired.

This is the outside projection for Monologue Muet exhibition, a photography work by Sue Elie Andrade De.
Based on her video called The Rain, i have created the outside projection with response to physical properties, like doors and windows.

Excerpts from the HYPHEMA audiovisual concert held at Casa das Mudas Arts Center on December 8th 2007 for the Madeira DIG Festival 2007.
This is the first DVD and live performance, published by Pixelnerve. It acts upon a musician and a visual artists that interact together using audio feed and realtime audio-reactive visuals. A project created by myself and Jerome Faria in 2007. Offical Website at hyphema.pixelnerve.com

Oh, such good memories.