Sims random ramblings

Just did another one, off my Susan ward image.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsBXcmyfFgM

So Ed Halley wrote this python script that creates an animation from an SVG file by building the image up shape by shape and doing nice tracking between them and so on. After he showed off his first anim in the jabber/irc room and posted the link to the script I couldnt resist having a play. Took a few tweaks to make the script play nice with win, but once thats done it was just a matter of setting it going and waiting while inkscape rendered a few thousand frames.

The first attempt i did shows that my style of drawing makes for a fairly random video. Since the animation is being done from the z-order info and my images are done in a pretty loose manner, the end result jumps about quite a lot rather than being a particularly ordered like eds, but its still kinda cool to watch them appear from the blank page. Decided I’d play with a drawing with slightly less objects while I improved the technique, so picked my Ford shelby GR-1 image. Got the same sort of slightly random video, so I tidied it up a bit before I ran it again by grouping objects from each area so the vid focuses on one region at a time. Seems to work fairly well, just need to find some music for it.

links:

Eds vids:

Punk Angel build up: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lrnreVi3fg&NR=1

Naginata Onna build up: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNTeoHeGMQY

Lamborgini build up: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wl6hXurUaI

I havent had all that much time to code on inkscape this last release, but one of the things I did get in there is stock pattern support. To get your patterns to work as stock ones theres a little more to it than just c/p to the patterns.svg file. Rob A has done a nice little tutorial that explains it pretty well:

http://ffaat.pointclark.net/blog/archives/143-Creating-and-Adding-Custom-Patterns-to-Inkscape.html

not xmas, but the when we announce the About Screen contest for the upcoming release of Inkscape (0.46).

If you like the idea of having your art as the about screen of an app with a install base in the hundreds of thousands, then get to work! (the 0.45.1 packages had >1mil downloads from sourceforge!)

The contest deadline is January 6th, 2008. As with the past few contests we’ve had, it is being done on DeviantART ( http://www.deviantart.com/ ).

You can find out more about it at:

http://inkscapers.deviantart.com/journal/16001755/

Additionally, if you have a DeviantART account, please show the news some “love” so we can hopefully get the story promoted to the front page.

http://news.deviantart.com/article/39226/

Good Luck! Have fun! Draw Freely.

One more inkscape learning resource that I’d not seen before:

http://www.microugly.com/inkscape-quickguide/

very nicely presented quick guide to inscape which covers enough of the basics to get started, plus a few of the more interesting features.

Written by microUgly who has also created a forums site over at www.inkscapeforums.com 

So bulia put out a call for artwork on the inkscape devel and user lists, specifically asking for a car which could show off the new blur filter functionality in SVN.  Four days later, hrum poted this little beauty on dev art:

a Car by ~hrum on deviantART


great to see what can be done with inkscape these days, hopefully RL will slow down long enough to let me have a play some time soon too