Some rainy days

The raining season in Darmstadt is in full swing, so it is the ideal time to sit at home and work on the computer. I have been busy working implementing some geographical map features for fwcrawler, which proved to be relatively easier than i thought. The idea is to put users and artists to their countries of origin in the world map. I will be able to put it online in several days. I have used some pretty advanced stuff from wordnet to be able to create a small geographical database with countries, cities and counties. Some bugs remain, for example the database considers James to be a river in the USA, and not a personal name, and Twin a city in the USA, and not a family relation, but this will be fixed and running in no time.

Besides, I have sorted out some of my old stuff and made some new images. Enjoy.

Multi Cube Layers

I have been trying to combine cubes of different granularity. It seems easy for now to create several cubist images with different cube size with Java and than combine them as layers with different blending in Photoshop. This has the advantage that one can adjust the myriad of Photoshop filters available and see the final result.

More Cubism and Photomosaics

The latest images, experiments with techniques, shapes,texture

Cube Me

Photo mosaics can be funny. A large "me" made of thousands of small "mini me's" :-)

Dirk's birthday

TOnight was Dirk's birthday, a good friend of mine who studies design. We had a nice party with old friends from Darmstadt.
I got inspired to do a cubist portrait of Dirk, but I did not have a photo of him with quality good enough to print, so I could not bring him the present in time.( i was also totally tired today, first several hours of final diplomthesis revisions and then 3 hours of aerobics and volleyball)

But maybe some other time. At least I got ideas for a cool new modification of cubism with classical photomocaics software
The result is here, Dirk liked the idead to make a photo collage of him in cubist style. I will give myself some time to make something really good, the first result is here

Cubism Improvements

I improved my algorithm in 2 small ways:
-automatic blurring of region borders
-more flexible window cropping

Cubism Caricatures

I have played some more with my Java cubism algorithm.
It can be summed in several steps:
-create a hexagonal grid
-split the hexagons in 3 parallelograms to simulate 3d cubes
-assugn to each hexagon a cut from the original photo image
-calculate the cut size according to the image content of the photo, e.g. eyes are an important visual element and should be repeated more
-from each quadratic cut get three deformed subshapes to create 3d cube illusion

In this way, a single input picture gives illusion of multiple angles, eyes become facetous, etc. , all one needs is my java program, an input photo, and a mask with important regions. One may manually choose eyes, or use a computer vision algorithm to do this automatically, or use any other image to superimpose, e,g, the photo of a famous person works nicely with a caricature of the same person :-)

I wondered wheteher it may be interesting to create a photo gallery of caricatures of politicians with my algoritm