If there was something that I really missed since I moved to the UK, that was wild nature. The smell of grass in the morning, or a sunset without light pollution, or the silence of a forest. These kinds of things can't really be appreciated if your main focus is just to get on with your day to day job, and reach the end of the week without stressing too much.
A quest for the perfect creative coding framework
Note: this article is subject to be updated as soon as I find a framework that meets my criteria! If you find anything that can be proved to be incorrect, please let me know so I can address it.
What I am looking for?
A shell friendly, text-editor agnostic framework for creating visuals that is fun and has good enough performance. Hot-reloading would be great. An interpreted language wins over compiled ones: even if it's less performant, no compilation step means it's actually easier to stay in the zone and make something creative and interesting.
Goofing around with fish (the shell)
I've been recently nerd-sniped by a geek friend about fish-shell (and that really says it all about what kind of person I am).
Anyways.. I've been a zsh and oh-my-zsh user for a long time now, way before zsh was promoted as the default shell on macOS. It's been a fun ride, full of autocompletions, fancy themes and quick history browsing. I quite enjoyed it, especially compared to the "duller" bash. But since I'm always up for trying out something new and living my digital life on the edge, I decided to give it a try for a while.. especially considering that at work I'm forced to use tcsh.
This brief post is a recap of my experience after playing around with fish
for a few weeks.
Autocompletion
The main "selling point" of fish is that it's dev friendly and provides an interactive autocompletion experience. It's hard to describe exactly how it feels while typing, that's something you have to try to get familiar to.. here's a quick gif to give you a hint:
Conda for the pipeline person
Time for reading: 15 minutes
2024/02 EDIT: I still believe in the value of conda pack, but these days my approach with third party tools that I don't own is a lot more conservative.
Who am I?
- A Pipeline TD trying to write, test and ship code that requires third party dependenciesFor those who are not from the VFX industry, a Pipeline TD is a poor fellow that was too technical to be a VFX artist but didn't feel pursuing the good, cozy warm life of a software developer. He's basically a dev who likes movies more than startups, and should seriously reconsider his/her life choices.
How this site works
In the last 2 weekends, I spent a bit of time revamping the backbone of this website since I felt I needed to have more control over it, not just on the presentation layer, but also on the architecture (while I was there, I did also add a sprinkle of darkness to the CSS but that's not what I want to focus on in this post).
Unreal Engine + Python API
To those who aren't in the UE loop it might seem weird, but yes! UE4 has been offering a Python API for a while now (iirc, since end of 2019).
It also ships with a shiny Python3.7 interpreter, as recommended by the vfxplatform.
Its main purpose is to offer a way to integrate Unreal into existing workflows, and automate the heck out of it! This means that it's definitely NOT meant to be used for anything "in game". That would be crazy, performance-wise.
Geospatial workflows in Houdini
Premise
What follows is nothing more than a bunch of CLI commands and scripts that - put together - resemble a workflow useful when exploring and visualizing geospatial data.
Source GeoTIFF, downsampled to 16bit
DEM data rendered in Houdini
Where to get the data?
Fun with the new RPI HQ Camera
Preface..
Last April, while probably half of the world was locked down in their rooms, the Raspberry PI team delighted us with a new toy. I guess they realized we would have a lot more free time in our weekends! ๐
I quickly glanced at it and the specs but I didn't want to be a beta-tester so I decided to wait for people to start playing with it before going into furious DIY purchase mode.
Fast forward to now - November 2020. We're facing the second UK lockdown, and still filling our lives with plenty of zoom/google meet/skype/facetime calls. I decided to improve my virtual appearance and I started to look online for a webcam replacement. I'm currently using my iPhone - but since it streams the video via wifi the image quality - despite the amazing camera sensor - isn't top notch due to the huge compression.
Call 4 makers - Fablab Latina
Descrizione del progetto:
Portraits! รจ un'installazione artistica interattiva che realizza ritratti astratti.
Google Slides: slides
Video di presentazione:
Portraits! (ita) from VVZ3N on Vimeo.
Macchina in azione:
Meccanismo del grilletto:
Link al design CAD: https://a360.co/2Os6FV5
Circuito della CNC:
Che cos'รจ l'arte computazionale? Che cos'รจ l'arte generativa?
http://valerioviperino.me/portfolio/what_is_gen_art/
Ispirazione: Patrick Tresset, Paul the Robot
Sito web della mostra "Echosystems":
http://echosystems.xyz
Useful electronic components
After many years of accumulating electronic bits and pieces, I thought it may be useful to have a list of different components grouped by their purpose.
So here it is!