Eureka

I am extremely pleased. This refers to one of the points in the previous entry, about saving image data a different way to enable a unique transitioning effect. I suggest you "open in new window" so you can look at it while you read.

HERE is a, uh, comic-book form representation of the transition effect I've been working on. I intended to save it as a movie, but due to certain things I'm not going to whine about here, that will have to wait for now. What you see, though, is one out of every few frames of a fully automated transition between two pictures (I ran it to do 99 frames between them). They're shown here at about a third their original size; you'll have to take my word for it for now that the detail looks great.

As far as you'll be able to tell from looking at it, it resembles some kind of morphing; but it absolutely does not use the conventional morphing procedure at all. There are no control points. In fact, there is no warping; nothing actually moves. Without giving away too much of the trick, worthy of a freakin' PATENT if I do say so myself, what I've come up with is a systematic (though computationally slow) way for all the colors to "bleed" into the right place.

There is a simplicity to the "underlying trick" that makes it tempting for me to just blurt it out. I know there are tons of creative people out there devising algorithms, so it's possible that it's been done. But I feel optimistic about this one. It's just very ... me.

The fact that it looks hand-painted is just a bonus, as far as I'm concerned. I'm so sick of the look of the morphing effect that everybody and his brother uses now in the most inappropriately mundane presentations (morphs were supposed to be terrifying and sci-fi, not for stuff like the Style Channel). And the fact that I've been trying to pull off something like this for a few years makes it quite rewarding.

Of course this won't work if you specifically want to turn a human into an animal, preserving the face and body throughout the transition. The standard method with control points will still be needed for that. This is more for something that would be used in place of a crossfade, where an "arty" look is wanted.

Okay. Almost 7:00 AM. Been up all night. Must sleep.

EDIT 8:00 PM
To nearly quote Indiscipline, I'm looking at it again to see if I still like it -- I do. Time spent dreaming up ways to achieve something like this, about five years. Time spent on this particular algorithm, from conception to execution, less than a week. My source file, by the way, is called "grail.cpp". I thought I was going to have to change it to "dud.cpp" or something of that nature, but it looks like that won't be necessary.

Updates

Okay, so I'm not going to get any "wuffie" at this rate. Don't post regularly, and you cease to exist out there.

Update #1: moving all my equipment back to the Village Gate. May (likely) crash there for a while just to be cheap. I also like to spend several hours working on music and then pass out from exhaustion. I need carpet remnants and something resembling a large desk/workbench. Hopefully my meager tax return will show up soon.

Update #2: priorities for the animated blobs are incorporating a "filter map" and a vague simulation of scratch pencil marks. The filter map mechanism -- another bitmap the same size as the main one, in which lighter areas mean "sharpen" and darker areas mean "blur" -- already works, it's just a question of how to generate the actual map itself. I've experimented with using other images as filter maps, but I think it needs to be simpler than a typical image.

Update #3: remix concerns -- it occurs to me that when I make a list of things that need to be worked on, some of those things are immensely important and others are just things I kind of feel like fiddling with. So I should concentrate on making sure the important stuff is, in fact, getting done. Prioritize, in other words.

Update #4: something I've been interested in for several years now, in general, is a way to express/store image data other than "at x and y, its values are r, g, and b", so that I can transition from one to another without looking like a conventional crossfade or morph. I've had several disappointing shots at this, but I'm working on a new idea that might have promise. We'll see.

Update #5: no storyboard. I need someone to convince me that this is a life or death issue!

Tiny detail

I seem to be very good at finding some tiny detail to spend an enormous amount of time on.

It matters, though. When that detail goes whizzing by you, it adds to the cumulative effect.

By the way, the reason I haven't written in here for a while is I've been hesitant to push those nifty generative pix down ... life must move on, though. "There will always be more". :)