Still As Life

I had an assignment due on Monday for KKB210: Computational Arts 1, where I had to create 3 computational art works. This has kept me pretty busy over the past week or so, especially since I had another assignment due on Tuesday, just a 1500-1800 word essay fortunately, so it didn’t take up too much time.

For full details on everything I’ve done for this assignment, have a look at my computational arts blog. I’ve learned a lot about various programming environments and languages in relation to computational arts and live-coding. In particular, I’ve found the Processing Development Environment and Quartz Composer quite interesting and fun to work with. Of course, Quartz Composer isn’t a programming environment, but a patching tool.

I have always been particularly interested in fractals and other forms of digital art, so the computational arts subjects at uni were particularly appealing to me, and thus far have been exactly what I was looking for.

I have made a few fractal animations previously, including one for my NSW Higher School Certificate that I synced up with music. On my second fractal animation, I created the music for it myself instead of using an existing piece. Using Quartz Composer and Processing, I am able to make very similar effects, though not fractals, and have them render and animate in real-time. Two of my artworks for KKB210 are actually live rendered animations based on audio input. You can have a look at them here and here. They are both available under feel free to edit them, redistribute them etc, just take note that it is an attribution, non-commercial, share-a-like license (full details are available on http://matthewbrown.net.au), so you do have say where you got it from if you are re-distributing it.

Now, while I am a novice at the whole live-rendered animations to music and the like, I am happy to do some for events where it is appropriate. Let me know at matt at stillaslife dot com.

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It’s times like these that I am especially glad I have already upgraded my computer.

I have been re-rendering a bunch of fractals for print at 300 dpi on A0 and A2 sized paper. Even on the new computer, in order to get them done in time to have the high res images ready for printing for the exhibition I have had to cut the quality down compared to what I usually do them at. I’m looking at 15 hours on average for a fractal that is roughly half the quality of my normal renders, though once printed this won’t be so noticeable. This also results in around 3gb of RAM being used at any one time for the render. This is for A0. A2 I am averaging around 5 hours at half the quality with around 1 gb of RAM being used at any one time.

I’m not game to try and A0 on the old computer at all. I have had an A2 size one rendering though, it has an estimated render time of 40 hours at the same quality level as on the new computer, just so you have a comparison. I have also had to limit the RAM usage on the old computer since it only has 1gb of RAM. This means that instead of rendering the entire fractal, it will render it in 5 blocks which is slower, but it’s the only way I can do it on the old one.

Rendering A0 fractals on the new computer does render it virtually useless. While they on average use 3gb of the available RAM, they push the overall RAM usage up to an average of 98%, even when I close down the majority of things. Thus it is pretty pointless to even try to do anything else on it. Since I have limited the RAM usage on the old computer, it is still usable, but since I’m not rendering anything on the laptop, it doesn’t matter and I may as well let Apophysis have as much of the CPU time as possible.

While my laptop should do a reasonable job of rendering the fractals, since it is roughly half as powerful as Quadzilla (my Macbook Pro is a Core 2 Duo with 2gb of RAM, Quadzilla is a Core 2 Quad with 4gb of RAM), but I need the laptop to be usable all the time for uni and so on.

I would love to render all my fractals at these resolutions, but also at the quality I normally do them at. I’m thinking I’ll pick up another 4gb of RAM soon, though probably not for another fortnight or so since I have rent next weekend and the prints of these fractals are going to cost $56 each. If I get the extra RAM, that should make the computer usable whilst rendering, which means that it will be a lot easier for me to do them like this. Until then though, I could just limit the RAM usage to half and it should also be fine. I’ll just have to have a play around with it once these ones for the exhibition are done.

For those who have only seen my first fractal animation, the one I will be showing on Wednesday is a newer one that I did around September 2007. I also did the audio track for this one.

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