Went on a mission to remember all the books I’ve read and find the covers I remember from reading them. Partly as a reminder of all the great, mind-expanding books and partly because I think my brain is wired visually, I can often remember the cover but not the story. Over the years, I’ve kept…
A new ring for Julie’s 22nd wedding anniversary. The stone of the year is Spinel, nice and hard 8 on the Mohs scale, usually red colour but comes in a variety, so went for blue. Looked around on Pinterest for some interesting designs and came up with this open spiral look. Decided to create it…
Testing out Gaussian Splatting workflow. What are you talking about, you ask… well, Gaussian Splats are the latest fad for capturing and rendering in real-time, intricate, organic-looking 3D scenes and objects. Basically, a point cloud with each point being a little blob of texture, add millions of them together, and you can recreate realistic-looking scenes…
While tinkering around with a few friends at ‘Nerd Club ‘, we decided to each come up with a project using an ESP32 microcontroller. And so began many months of exploring what could be done with these little boards. The first challenge was to get one powered up, connected to a few sensors and a…
We were asked to help develop a new skill-based game called the £10k Hat-Trick. The game is a take on the pub classics, beer pong, shuffleboard and darts. Completing each round wins the player £10k! At Solarflare I developed the code that runs the game states on a large screen to guide players through the…
Solarflare was approached by Metallic to create a fun, interactive game for Nike’s launch of their new clothing range, Nocta. I had previously used a technique where a laser pointer dot is tracked using just a webcam, and by carefully tuning the camera sensitivity settings, the camera could be made to only see the reflected…
I have been running a series of six half marathons in different European cities (Lisbon, Berlin, Cardiff, Prague, Valencia and Copenhagen) with some friends. I thought I’d try to create personalised slate coasters with the course maps laser-engraved on them, for Christmas presents, to celebrate the achievement. Simple, you’d think, but it turned out to…
I managed to borrow a LaserCube from Ed, a small portable laser projector and after getting it working (it was an older model) I wanted a fun project to show off its coolness. Inspired by a video I saw somewhere, where they had aligned a laser and a projector that makes the most of both…
Tinkering around with the amazing T3D 3D textures in Touchdesigner. Followed a couple of tutorials on how to implement reaction diffusion in 3D. using a spinning seed object to source the reaction. Loved experimenting with the 3D textures, takes all the 2D image manipulation and applies it to a volume which can then be skinned…
Launch Rockets A fun little project, retro 8bit inspired, animated intro to Solarflare’s Launch (Labs) page. Created in Cables.gl ( I seem to alternate between projects in TouchDesigner and Cables) Cables doesn’t seem to have a concept of persistent particles, so I found a node that someone had created to store their positions between frames…
Experimenting with Touchdesigner and Curl Noise, a mathematical function which can be used to drive a particle system and create organic, turbulent-looking movement. Experimented with a couple of ways to create the effect in TD. There’s something hypnotic about the motion, like artificial life. I Created the first version by following this tutorial Then a…
A nice double ring for Julie for our 21st wedding anniversary. Inspired by our climb up Kilimanjaro in Tanzania and seeing the Tanzanite stones, which only come from there Both rings are only held together by the stone setting. Had a tough time getting the stone to stay in the rub-over setting, the first one…
This was a fun little project combining realtime AI generative images and a 2D fluid simulation with a touch screen. Tapping and dragging on the touchscreen, using this point as the input to the fluid simulation. Then, feeding the resulting images to an image2image Stream-Diffusion image generator from Dotsimulate. A range of different prompts can…
As part of a Solarflare project, we needed to visualise an AI, a large language model, “thinking” when users asked it a question. I came up with a fun point cloud simulation developed using cables.gl and an image to instanced points workflow. The location of the points could be manipulated using a wide range of…
Solarflare was asked to come up with a way to enhance guests’ experience as they entered an event through a tropical garden. We came up with the idea of turning the plants into sensors which would trigger audio and video projection mapping as guests approached and touched them. Using the Biotron from Playtronica which detects…
I was lucky enough to get a telescope for Christmas last year and since then I’ve been on a steep learning curve to try and take some photos with it. Turns out there’s a lot more to taking a decent photo of things up there than you’d think. There are lots of different types of…
Inspired by seeing similar map pendants online, I decided to have a go at making one myself. After thinking about laser cutting the silver and quickly realising that my Snapmaker 1w laser engraver wouldn’t dent silver metal, I pivoted to CNC milling the map design into the silver. I decided to base the map’s location…
My second collaboration with artist Jimmy C, to reinterpret one of his paintings of a skull into AR. We worked on this project a few years ago, back when the HTC Vive was the best VR headset and it needed cabling back to a high-end PC to render the graphics. Originally developed in Touchdesigner. We…
When I left home for the first time many years ago I somehow ended up with a kitchen knife which was purchased while on holiday with my parents in Spain as a child. The knife was nothing special but it has followed me around for the last 30 odd years while many other items have…
A recommendation from a friend and an interesting chat over a coffee led to a collaboration with artist Jonathan Huxley to explore emergent behaviour and whether his paintings of stylised figures in crowds could be simulated on a computer. Jonathan’s paintings of abstract people have a natural behavioural quality to them which to Jonathan just…
Trying out a different shaped stone and a novel mount. A rectangular octagon cut aquamarine stone held between two plates with groves filed in them and a ‘v’ channel for the bottom to sit in. Between the 3 groves, they hold the stone nicely. A delicate ring which has proved to be a favourite everyday…
This project is a return to my fascination with single line drawings and a chat with Ed who was looking for interesting artwork to showcase the Terrapen plotter he was building. A single line drawing algorithm tries to draw a picture without taking the pen off the paper, by scribbling back and forth with a…
Combining Augmented Reality with a traditional Masked Ball, this was the concept that Solarflare Studio collaborated on with Head of House. Could we create a system where guests would be able to see each other dressed in fantastic augmented masks as they freely walked around…? After some initial ideas sessions, we settled on the Magic…
Experiments with Blender Geometry Nodes. A 4D noise texture, fed into a volume node and then into a volume to mesh node. Managed to get a nice translucent subsurface scatter material that looks like weird flesh. Took lots of work to get the animated noise texture to seamlessly loop. Used this tutorial and adapted it…
Several projects exploring Geometry nodes and honing my Blendering skills. So love using Blender, its amazing considering it free! I’ve used Sheepit render farm for a lot for the animations and even for the larger, longer stills.
For the last year, I have collaborated on a multi-user VR-audio-performance project. During the performance, Leslie Dreere movements are used to drive generative VR visuals and an audio soundtrack. Up to 4 viewers can watch in VR, each with a unique perspective on Leslies performance. I developed the VR and multi-user communications using Unity which…
For Easter, I thought I’d have a go at creating bespoke chocolate versions of our mascot, Renaii. The first step was model cleanup and prep for 3D printing, making it watertight using Blender. The model was printed on my Snapmaker A350. Next, I created moulds using food-safe silicon rubber. One of the toughest parts was…
3D printers are great! But they are slow… Timelapse speeds up slow things and makes them more interesting to watch… so, why not record time-lapses of some prints… This was the idea that lead me on a long journey to capture the best possible 3D printing timelapses. It turns out that I’m not the first…
Glitch art made with Cables.gl as part of a POC around making art accessible. Using touch, voice, or movement triggers the glitch effect. Had lots of fun trying out loads of different glitch effects and mixing them all together.
For the Dubai Expo 2020 we faced the challenge of creating a wide range of 3D content for a volumetric display made from hundreds of LED rods. As no authoring system existed for this type of display, I created an authoring and pre-visualisation system in TouchDesigner. 3D animations were created in TD to support each…
After 23 years dining around the first table I made, with so many great memories, its overdue time for an upgrade! The first table was made with the skills and tools I had at the time but it was getting a little warped, making the plates wobble and showing its age. I had been thinking…
More experiments with Cables.gl This time trying to create an interactive element for Solarflare Studios home page. This is my largest and most complex node graph yet. I managed to implement a particle system with persistent storage for the position, velocity, etc using a circular graph wiring, despite Cables not really supporting this. Try the…
Audio-reactive project using cables.gl a node-based visual programming environment for WebGL. Really fun to use, similar to Touch Designer but you can publish your creations straight to the web. This needs a fairly decent graphics card to get full framerate. The plugin for the live version below seems to have a glitch with the audio….
A little project for SolarFlare Labs around the Covid pandemic, to track an QR code and overlay an AR animation, playing with the black pixels in the QR code. Coded everything in Javascript and used AFrame for the AR tracking. Modelled the various shapes that the pixels form into using Blender and used the vertex…
Creation of an interactive WebGL background for the Digital Sanctuary of the Helsinki Fashion Week website. We were approached to help create part of this new fashion initiative, and through the course of various discussions, settled on using three.js and JavaScript to code the 3D interactive page. The main element, the orb or stimulato,r used…
Another simple but fun SparkAR filter to blur the live camera image based on the strength of the audio detected. The blur splits the image into RGB and shifts the colours different amounts similar to the chromatic aberration lens effect. SparkAR patch graph editor is a bit like using TouchDesigner and a nice way of…
Creating beautiful sculptures derived from the state of a person’s mind. The MindSculpture data visualisations use a combination of accelerometer sensor readings for movement and pulse sensors for heart rate. These are captured from a users wearable or smartphone using a logging app. This data is then processed in OpenOffice Calc to smooth, combine axis,…
A quick project in response to the current Coronavirus pandemic to visualise social distancing. Using TouchDesigner for the visuals and TSPS to track blobs and send position over OSG. Posted on LinkedIn as part of the Solarflare Studio Labs work. Love using TouchDesigner, it’s so nice to work with!
Trying to create a single-line portrait for the Processing day event in Bournemouth. I wanted a project that the public could engage with and which could be used with a plotter, which some of the others are building. Stumbled across some single-line drawings on Pinterest and thought that would be good to try and draw…
Here’s a timelapse of me building my latest (and probably last) BBQ. Sorry its a bit long, but its is strangely fascinating watching the rain dry on the paving stones and the shadows swinging around. Love how this turned out. It was a real labour of love, cutting hundreds of fiddly bits of slate to…
Came across this stone on Etsy while looking for something special for Julie’s 15th wedding anniversary ring. The traditional stone is rock crystal, which is basically quartz or ruby, so I thought some reddish quartz would cover both. The stone has little multicoloured flecks throughout, which makes it look like a cloud of confetti…
The latest bit of woodturning. A large, holey chunk of horse chestnut wood I ‘liberated’ from the park over the road. Only just managed to get the log on the back of the bike and cycle it home as it was so heavy. Chainsawed it in half to make two bowls. It nearly shook the…
Turning project to try and create a perfect sphere using a nice hollow log I found in the churchyard next door. I did some googling on how to create a sphere and using a deceptively simple method of turning it on each of its three-axis it comes out perfectly. It was made a little tricky…
Project to make an end-grain chopping board from lots of small yew logs I have been saving from a tree in the garden for the past few years. After watching lots of ‘how to’ videos, I was inspired to try and make my own. As suspected, cutting all the little logs square took hours but was well…
TouchDesigner generative real-time audio-reactive ident visual for Inition. Looking to advance my TouchDesigner skills, I embarked on creating a new real-time ident generator for the latest Inition branding, a very minimal-looking network of lines and polygons. Using a particle system, a Python script finds each point’s nearest neighbours in 3D space. These are then linked…
This was my first use of Gold for a ring for Julie’s 14th wedding anniversary gift. Bit more nerve-wracking than working with silver, but it turned out nice in the end. The opal seems to go well with the gold ring and really catches the light in a rainbow of colours. I managed to lose…
Been knocking out bowls since we last spoke, 6 new ones, yew, ash, walnut, sycamore, more yew and more ash. Some of the ash came from the local wood yard, been offering to take away their knotty bits that they can’t split. The yew is the last of Dad’s logs from ~1995, very well…
I’ve been working on this for a few weeks on and off, kept coming back to it as I learnt more, tweaking until I was happy. Modelled crystals with a tiny bit of bevel on the edges so they don’t look unnaturally sharp. A bit of vertex bevel on some of the points to make…
Created using a particle system of metaballs with just touching field strengths. Meshed, decimated heavily, wrote a Python script to subdivide all the separate objects and spherify them a little. Nice SSS material and depth of field camera. Glowing filament lights were created by tracing the paths of a turbulent particle system movement, then an emissive…
Some kind of DNA but not of Earth. Created a nice pearl-like Subsurface Scatter material on the spheres. Part of my learning Blender series. Rendered with the help of Sheepit renderfarm.