GuruBlog

I made a new music video for my track Moment to Moment rendered with blender

I made a video for a song I recorded in november using the technique I showed In my blog post on quaternoid rotations

Franz Knipp - a good friend of mine - is teaching kids how to code AND he has chosen one of my tracks for his promo video :-)

also check out his website http://dreamicode.com/

I wanted to play with the nle editor of blender a bit so my kids shot me some footage of our marble run and I cut it into a 30sec short film using blender

I decided to participate in this weeks "Vimeo Weekend Project". The project theme this week is "One Minute of Reflection"

the video has to be exact 1 minute long and use no paning, zooming or editing. It should be something that I'm grateful - so I chose my coffee-machine :-)

This is a small how-to video that explains how to design and print a cookiecutter using my Cookie-Cutter-Editor and a makerbot

How To Make a CookieCutter from Nikolaus Gradwohl on Vimeo.

the soundtrack is Awel by stefsax

I made this animation with Context Free Art and a small ruby script. The scroll down to see the sourcecode I have used for this file

Curling Recursion from Nikolaus Gradwohl on Vimeo.

I made another stop-motion video using toonloop and mencoder. This time its featuring a dancing little lego-sheep.

if you want to know how to convert a set of images to a movie using mencoder see this blog post

dancing sheep from Nikolaus Gradwohl on Vimeo.

if you have exported a directory full of single frames from a processing sketch or a tool like toonloop or gimp you can combine them to a video using mencoder like this.

mencoder "mf://*.jpg" -mf fps=12 -o output.avi -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg

the mplayer manual has more details in case you need them

here is a sample video i made using toonloop and some colored buildingblocks

buildingblocks toonloop video from Nikolaus Gradwohl on Vimeo.

update (23.11.2008): i made a processing library out of the codeexample above - guru

Today i read about touchless an opensource sdk microsoft has released. it enables you to track objects using a simple webcam to create apps similar to a multitouch display.

then i spent about 20 minutes coding a processing sketch that does roughly the same :-)

as you can see in the screenshot i cant affort the same cool toys the microsoft coder has in the demo video, so i had to use some post-its instead

below is the complete sourcecode of the app. I didn't export it as an applet this time, because the applet couldn't use the quicktime api. It also only works on mac and windows this time, because processing uses the quicktime api. on linux the gstreamer based replacement from codeanticode can be used.

when the programm starts hold up 2 different colored items (use colors that do not appear in the background) then click on the first color with the left mousebutton and on the second color using the right mousebutton. and then enjoy the "minority report"-experience zooming and rotating the image :-)

import processing.video.*;
import java.util.*;

Capture video;
PImage img; 

void setup() {
  size( 640, 480 );
  video = new Capture( this, width, height, 30 );
  img = loadImage( "mangoofdeath.jpg" );
  noStroke();
  smooth();
}

int searchColor1 = color( 128, 255, 0 );
int searchColor2 = color( 255, 0, 0 );

Point e1 = new Point( 0, 0 );
Point e2 = new Point( 640, 480);

boolean s1, s2;


void draw() {
  if ( video.available()) {
     video.read();
     pushMatrix();
     scale(-1,1);
     image( video, -width, 0, width, height );
     popMatrix();

     int idx = 0;

     ArrayList p1 = new ArrayList();
     ArrayList p2 = new ArrayList();
     for ( int y = 0; y < video.height ; y++ ) {
        for ( int x = video.width; x >0; x-- ) {
          if ( match( searchColor1, video.pixels[idx] )) {
            p1.add( new Point( x, y ));
            //fill( 255, 255, 0, 128 );
            //ellipse( x, y, 10, 10 );
          } else if (match( searchColor2, video.pixels[idx] )){
            p2.add( new Point( x, y ));
            //fill( 255, 0, 0, 128 );
            //ellipse( x, y, 10, 10 );
          }
          idx ++;
        }
     }

    noStroke();
    if (p1.size() > 0) e1 = avg( p1 );
    if (p2.size() > 0) e2 = avg( p2 );

    if (s1) {
      fill( 255, 255, 0, 128 );
      ellipse( e1.x, e1.y, 30, 30 );
    }
    if ( s2 ) {  
      fill( 255, 0, 0, 128 );
      ellipse( e2.x, e2.y, 30, 30 );
    }

    if (s1 && s2 ) {
      pushMatrix();
      translate( e1.x, e1.y );
      int dx = e2.x - e1.x;
      int dy = e2.y - e1.y;
      rotate( - atan2( e2.x -  + e1.x, e2.y - e1.y) + atan2( img.width, img.height));
      float zoom = sqrt ( dx * dx + dy * dy ) / 
           sqrt(img.width * img.width + img.height * img.height);
      scale(zoom, zoom ); 


      tint( 255, 200 );

      image( img, 0, 0 );
      strokeWeight( 3 );
      stroke( 255 );
      noFill();
      rect( 0,0,img.width, img.height );
      noTint();
      popMatrix();
    }
  }
}

boolean match( int c1, int c2 ) {
  int limit = 20;
   int sr = c1 >> 16 & 0xFF;
   int sg = c1 >> 8 & 0xFF;
   int sb = c1 & 0xFF;

   int cr = c2 >> 16 & 0xFF;
   int cg = c2 >> 8 & 0xFF;
   int cb = c2 & 0xFF;

   return cr > sr - limit && cr < sr + limit &&
     cg > sg - limit && cg < sg + limit && 
     cb > sb - limit && cb < sb + limit;
}

void mousePressed() {
  if (mouseButton == LEFT) {
      searchColor1 = get( mouseX, mouseY );
      s1 = true;
  }
  if (mouseButton == RIGHT) {
     searchColor2 = get( mouseX, mouseY );
     s2 = true;
  }
}

void keyPressed() {
  s1 = false;
  s2 = false;
}

Point avg( ArrayList l ) {
  if (l.size() == 0) {
    return new Point( 0, 0 );
  }
  int x = 0;
  int y = 0;
  for( Iterator i = l.iterator(); i.hasNext(); ) {
      Point p = (Point)i.next();
      x += p.x;
      y += p.y;
  }
  return new Point( x  / l.size(), y / l.size());
}

public class Point {
  int x;
  int y;

  Point( int x, int y ) {
    this.x = x;
    this.y = y;
  }
}