The making of: Nokia Friends, generative characters from postspectacular on Vimeo.

Karsten Schmidt sends us a behind-the-scenes mini-movie that reveals how he created pudgy, bouncy animated characters using generative code in Processing. It’s fun to watch these cute creatures evolve through a process of iteration, from bare-bone physics to the finished product. The results are now in flagship Nokia stores worldwide as well as in a big installation at England’s Heathrow Airport in Terminal 5.

The open coding tool Processing has many, many libraries. Some deserve special mention. So I’m going to shift into infomercial mode for a second. Imagine video images of knives cutting through concrete blocks, etc.

Tried searching used book tables for math books because you can’t work out how to do vector math for illustration and the last math you remember is (barely) how to add?

Clueless about whether or not your sphere is intersecting your spline?

Wishing you could export an OBJ file?

Wait! Don’t waste valuable CPU cycles on sine and cosine calculations when your Processing sketch could run much faster with a lookup table! Don’t manually calculate pixels to mm conversions or wave generators!

Karsten Schmidt’s toxiclibs does all this — and more! It’s not just one library — it’s a whole bunch of libraries, each sharpened to slice right through one specific task.

Act now, and you also get tastier-than-ever particle physics using verlet integrators. (No clue what that means? You don’t read this site enough! It’s like other particle systems, only more awesomeish.)

It slices! It dices! It sorts color palettes! It spells color colour!

How much would you pay for this kind of useful library? $100? $200? $500? What, do you think this is Flash? (Sorry, couldn’t resist.) It’s free — free as in beer and as in speech. In fact, someone go buy toxi a beer.

Ahem.

Okay, I promise never to do that again. If none of that made any sense, go pick up Processing. And try those lookup tables — they really are a good thing. If you were a CPU, you wouldn’t want to keep calculating sine and cosine functions, either.

http://code.google.com/p/toxiclibs/

Side note: of interest to CDMotion readers, you’ll notice that JMF video support library is not there. That’s no loss — no fault of toxi’s, Java’s JMF library from Sun has long been abandonware and falls squarely in the “scream and run the other direction” category. I hope to revisit the issue of how to make video work right with Processing over the coming weeks. And having talked to folks at Sun, I am optimistic that, after years of waiting, video on Java is finally getting back on track. I’ll be talking more about that soon.

Nokia / Friends / Heathrow Terminal 5 from Universal Everything on Vimeo.

The insanely wonderful crew at Sheffield, UK’s Universal Everything send along a lovely new project – just in time to help ease any unpleasant thoughts about air travel. As part of an installation for Nokia, Universal Everything created a series of projected animations. My favorite is this generative visual of people of different shapes and sizes being whisked along by a people mover (click through to Vimeo for the full HD versions):

Universal Everything / Nokia / Heathrow Terminal 5 / 2008 from Universal Everything on Vimeo.

A procession of diverse characters glide by on a travelator - friends, families, kids, lovers, rugby teams, fat couples, thin models - celebrating the diversity of people seen at Heathrow T5.
Every character riding the travelator is unique, using generative software to create an ever-growing population.

Perhaps I need a mobile version I can take with me through less-lovely airports or during gate hold delays.

It’s really brilliant stuff, and demonstrates that the aesthetics of generative visuals can cover quite a gamut. But by now, I’m bet you’re already wondering what’s powering the very-nice physics interactions, built in Processing. I’m a big fan of the traer.physics library for Processing, but you won’t get results like this — in fact, part of what I like about traer.physics is that it’s often unpredictable once you set up a dynamic system! Processing virtuoso toxi had the same experience, so he adapted a different approach to physics via a technique called Verlet integration, what is commonly seen in "ragdoll physics" and cloth. It’s a technique prized for its relative stability, which the alternative Euler physics techniques tend to lack. (Darnit, I wish I paid more attention in math class, but that’s another story.)

Toxi has been building his own library. Bits of it are on toxiclibs on Google Code, although there’s a little reorganization going on over there so I don’t see a download. I’m half tempted to try implementing this just to better understand what’s going on under the hood. Anyone offer hourly math tutorials? I can barter. I could teach you to make really good burgoo and mint juleps.

Here’s another example of Toxi testing the library, which contains some other visualizations that let you see better how the physics algorithms work: