Getting more aggressive with color and texture…
Category Archives: effects
Genuary 4, 2024: Big Wet Pixels (and No Palettes)
It took me a minute to get going this year, mainly because my watercolor simulation code is a big pile of spaghetti that’s been artfully splattered across the walls and left to dry in place. I’ll have to do a bit of cleaning before I can have more serious fun with it. But I did at least manage to get my synthetic paper layer working, more or less. This video serves the prompts for both #genuary4 (Pixels) and #genuary2 (No Palettes). Happy #genuary to all who observe!
Genuary 2023: Impossible Paint
I love to tinker with code that makes pictures. Most of that tinkering happens in private, often because it’s for a project that’s still under wraps. But I so enjoy watching the process and progress of generative artists who post their work online, and I’ve always thought it would be fun to share my own stuff that way. So when I heard about Genuary, the pull was too strong to resist.
Here’s a snapshot of some work in progress, using a realtime watercolor simulator I’ve been writing in Unity. Some thoughts on what I’m doing here: it turns out I’m not super interested in mimicking reality. But I get really excited about the qualia of real materials, because they kick back at you in such wonderful and unexpected ways. What I seem to be after is a sort of caricature of those phenomena: I want it to give me those feelings, and if it bends the laws of physics, so much the better. Thus, Impossible Paint.
Spreading Chaos
MTV Top 20 Video Countdown (1994)
MTV Top 20 Video Countdown (1994) from Cassidy Curtis on Vimeo.
In the 1990’s, it was typical for production companies to start their demo reels with a clock-wipe countdown. Some companies would use this as an opportunity to say something about their style, and do custom animation. (Will Vinton Studios, I remember, had a particularly cool stop-motion countdown at that time.) I thought it would be cool for Xaos to have a countdown that reflected our particular style of work, so I created this drippy ink effect counting down from 10 to 1, and a drippy version of the Xaos logo, which we put at the beginning and end of our demo reel respectively.
Some time after this, our producer got a call from MTV. They had this show called “Top 20 Video Countdown”. They wanted to use this effect for the bumpers and interstitials. Could we add the numbers 11 through 20? Our producer said “of course”, and charged them a lot of money. But it didn’t really take me that long.