Musing : Confusing : Deluding

I bought CS4 Production Premium the other day. I haven’t had much time to play with it, but I did download a few Flaming Pear plugins and make this desktop background for myself. I designed it for my laptop, so the 1440×900 is the original, and the 1600×1200 is just scaled up (non-uniformly) from that.

Download 1440×900 or 1600×1200.

Facial analysis and mimicry is really coming along! This article about Image Metrics’ “Emily” (video in the article, or a slightly different one on YouTube) is interesting, but the footage seems to be of a real Emily with a synthesized face, making it hard to tell how good the computer-generated part really is.

Pendulum Alter Ego Facial Animations shows three heads expressing a variety of emotions. 3D morphable model face animation describes a method developed by Volker Blanz and Thomas Vetter of the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, also interesting. This response to that video shows several examples of making famous paintings appear to speak by applying Blanz’ and Vetter’s technique.

All this reminds me of a video I saw about a year ago. Women In Art doesn’t make the paintings come alive, it morphs from one to another. Beautifully done, and embedded below:

Verdana, Skia, Jazz LET.

I’ve modified the Context Free “weighting demo” to be more colorful. Basically, I set saturation to 1.0 and made each branch add a bit to the hue (starting at 0, for red). Not big code changes, but I think this version produces much more attractive images.

I adjusted the whitespace to make a little more sense, and switched to using all verbose commands for clarity.

Download the cfdg, or copy:

startshape SEED1

background {
    brightness -1
}

rule SEED1 {
    SQUARE{}
    SEED1 {
        y 1.2 size 0.99 rotate 1.5
        brightness 0.03 hue 0 saturation 1.0
    }
}

rule SEED1 0.05 {
    SEED1 { flip 90 }
}

rule SEED1 0.05 {
    SQUARE{}
    SEED1 {
        y 1.2 rotate 1.5 size 0.99 flip 90
        hue 10 brightness -0.5
    }
    SEED1 {
        x 1.2 y 1.2 rotate -60 size 0.6
        brightness -0.5
    }
    SEED1 {
        x -1.2 y 1.2 rotate 60 flip 90 size 0.5
        hue 10 brightness -0.5
    }
}