You signed in with another tab or window. Reload to refresh your session.You signed out in another tab or window. Reload to refresh your session.You switched accounts on another tab or window. Reload to refresh your session.Dismiss alert
Last year I wanted to generate a catalog of "Strange Items" - procedurally generated objects, rendered in POVRay, along with wacky descriptions, laid out in magazine fashion and rendered to PDF.
I didn't get it done.1 Part of the problem was that I took a vacation mid-month that ate a lot of time, the other issue was that "items" was too broad. The output was boring because there was nothing to optimize towards.
But it seems a shame to let all that PDF + POVRay code go to waste AND I still think the idea of a generative catalog has merit. It just needs more focus! So this year I'm taking another run at it, but with the goal of generating a Catalog of Starships. Or maybe more like a Classified Ads. All manner of used and new space vehicles, satellites, escape pods, and maybe even space stations, at low low prices!
The text was updated successfully, but these errors were encountered:
Some of you may notice this entry contains far less than 50,000 words of text. This is intentional. As the GitHub repo explains:
...since the book is mainly a frame to show pretty pictures, and the common exchange rate is "One Picture == One Thousand Words", there is another way to meet the NaNo requirement: the book contains 50 pages of generated pictures (48 pages, plus front and back cover), thus the equivalent of 50,000 words.
Script / module language is all Perl. Most text data was taken from Corpora. Pretty pictures rendered by POV-Ray, a raytracer which IMO is especially well-suited to procgen art. Collation and layout by PDF::API2 library. Rendering took approx. 8 hours on a Pentium 4 (top-of-the-line for 2006!)
The very high-level of how the ship generation works is:
Start with a "seed" object (cube or sometimes, a cylinder)
Recursively add "components" (more cubes, bends, cylinders etc) until a certain depth is reached. Some objects can branch (a box), others can only terminate (the long spikes or glass sphere)
Optionally, slice the result in half and mirror it for bilateral symmetry. Or, make a more drastic cut and rotate it multiple times for a full 360 degrees.
I went hard on the "art book" this year, but I probably won't do it again: collections of generated objects, or compilations of little vignettes, are probably better suited to Twitter bots than a "book".
Last year I wanted to generate a catalog of "Strange Items" - procedurally generated objects, rendered in POVRay, along with wacky descriptions, laid out in magazine fashion and rendered to PDF.
I didn't get it done.1 Part of the problem was that I took a vacation mid-month that ate a lot of time, the other issue was that "items" was too broad. The output was boring because there was nothing to optimize towards.
But it seems a shame to let all that PDF + POVRay code go to waste AND I still think the idea of a generative catalog has merit. It just needs more focus! So this year I'm taking another run at it, but with the goal of generating a Catalog of Starships. Or maybe more like a Classified Ads. All manner of used and new space vehicles, satellites, escape pods, and maybe even space stations, at low low prices!
The text was updated successfully, but these errors were encountered: