Brendan Dawes
The Art of Form and Code

That Was The Week That Was — 26th January 2020

With a new commercial piece of work starting next week, which will see me working in Processing, my thoughts turned to having to switch tools I use dependent on the output. With this real-time interactive piece, Houdini wasn't an option, and besides which would probably be overkill anyway. I've been meaning to look into Notch, which is a like Houdini but does real-time, or Nodes.io, but Notch is PC only, not something I currently own, but I'm seriously tempted as I really like the visual programming technique. Maybe I should dive more into Touch Designer.

I did manage to finally see Joker and it did not disappoint. I think the word masterpiece springs to mind. Phoenix's performance is incredible and up there with De Niro in Taxi Driver for sure, which I believe was part of the inspiration for the storyline, alongside The King of Comedy.

Meanwhile, back in Houdini, I did some simple stuff to try and continue filling the gaps in my knowledge, like making things appear over time.

I also spent several hours working out how to control the scatter of points on a shape, but have control over their distance from the edge. In the end I wrote a blog post about it, if only to remind me how to do it.

The above was born out a solution I was trying to find for a piece of work which will be a poster for an event later in the year.

Runway ML is something I've played with a while back when I was exploring machine learning. It's kind of like AI for non geeks. OK, I am a geek, and have in the past played around with core AI tool sets, but Runway ML is a lot of fun. Recently they updated the software so you can now train your own models — something that is very welcome. On hearing that, I updated the app then set about training a model based on minimalist buildings via the minimalismoarchitecture Instagram account, getting the images via a nice command line thing called Instaloader. Results were quite pleasing.

Having grown frustrated with dust collecting on the stylus on my turntable, I bought a nice little brush from Thakker, which did a nice job of cleaning it, without risk of damage.

The end of the week I received an email from a lovely client, who wants to commission me again for a new piece of work, which is welcome news. We talk next week.