Starling
02-14-2004, 08:32 AM
My digital art hobby.
My main area of interest has been loosely the connection between mathematics and art. You could also call it the beauty of math, or the order of art. And I'm in luck, because as it happens, one of the probably top 10 strong areas on which the internet has grown is this junction of beautiful numbers. Fractals leap to mind as a good example. Lesser known examples would be polyhedra, integers, and tesselation. Add to that the fact that just doing any kind of art in a digital picture editting program introduces a certain inherent mathness to it.
To date, I have over 300 programs, mostly freeware image editor/makers, installed on my computer. This will be my description of why I've collected them and links with a little bit of review for some of the very best ones. It's my humble hope that the time I've taken searching and acquainting, and gradually knowing what I want and how to get it, will help you enjoy an early foray into this area. I don't have Adobe Photoshop, because I can't afford it - and I may never afford it. Not because I'll never have a spare $700, but rather because buying it would amount to excess or pickyness. It has a lot of very fine photo controls, and brings a lot of more basic ones into one program, but I can acheive all the basic ones in other programs. Like Jasc Paint Shop Pro. That one is about $100, and it is one piece of bought software I am happy to have. It loads quick, never crashes, handles layers, keeps me happy. It's what I used to compose the single example image of ten stills and 5 animations accompanying this post. One or two of the versatile editors I mention even has layer capability.
The examples.
I have provided an example picture for each of the programs I mention. I dashed these off quickly, partly to indicate how easy it is, and partly to show just one filter or program at a time, in isolation. Usually when I work on a raw photo, it goes in and out of programs and filters many times, spawning myriad sub-versions and containing lots of subconcious subtlety. These examples are small, to be better for web viewing. They would be more spectacular from firsthand creation at home. I have put all the examples, including an animation, in a 3rd & 4th post below for web viewing ease. Keep in mind that they look blocky here but the programs they represent are quite capable of hi-res, high quality images.
Platform.
My computer is a Pentium 3 running Windows 98. As a rule, there is plenty of dowloadable software, including freeware, for my platform. Naturally, what I mention here is what I know because it works on that platform. But often, I see in the spec list that it will work back to Win95, forward to the latest Windows, and requires only even the first Pentium, or even 486 processor in some cases. I'd say more than half the time, these authors also offer a Mac version. Much more often if it's shareware. And especially with some of the scientific and / or java ones, they also offer a version for Unix, Linux, or even less known systems.
If you're a beginner to the field, there is no reason why you should have to spend a lot of dough on additional software or hardware for your computer in order just to start playing and find out where you want to take it. And if you will always just want to do an occasional graphic or see something pretty just now and then, well then there will never be any reason to spend a lot. The internet-wide bag-o-tricks is just that good. To that end, that is, a pleasant introduction to easy graphics editting, here are 2 programs' websites. I have these, but I hardly use them because I have Jasc Paint Shop Pro.
Good basic image editors. They are freeware. Image Forge can be bought up to a pro version if desired.
Image Forge:
http://www.cursorarts.com/
Irfanview:
http://www.irfanview.com/
If you are a beginner, my best reccommendation is to download one of those two I just mentioned, plus the screen capturer I mention below, plus Aros, Kali, and the snowflake generator. See their descriptions and sites below.
If you are used to image editors, but just kind of frustrated by them, haven't had time to choose the best yet, I really can't say I have just one reccommended set. It will depend on your particular flavor of intermediacy. But I hope this collection of links will help.
On stability:
Let me tell you, the majority of the problems I've ever had with crashes have come from established, heavy-footprint software by Adobe and Microsoft. But getting down to a level as light and slick as even Jasc PSP has virtually never been a problem. And all these that I list have proven on my system to be just fine. Sometimes Java apps can be tricky and simply not work. I had a problem that turned out to be simple: my older java consoles were trumping the latest one. Easy fix. Rule of thumb: the smaller the better. None of these are annoying adware, either. Gimp has a problem of not having the same habitual structure as most windows programs. It's an issue of missing pieces, rather than inherently unstable or contradictory code. So parts just won't work when it seems like they should. It doesn't make a habit of crashing, however. And perhaps it's my own impatience that causes me to not know why certain pieces are missing. It is a more attention-demanding install.
Fractals.
I'm sure you've al heard of them at least in passing, but have you ever really gotten to enjoy really "navigating" through one? The term fractal has really come to mean to most people what is really called "boundary fractals". They are a closed figure on a 2D plane, except they are poked in ward and outward, even folded, infinitely. It's as if you laid a necklace on a table, and made it into the shape of a star, then put little star arms branching from the original star arms, then did a third scale of star arms, and so on. You'd find you'd have to supply additional length to the necklace. This is because of what's called "fractal dimension" - how tightly folded a figure is. Mathematicians can measure it based on the rules for making a given shape. They can even measure it for coastlines, leaf edges, and other 1D figures that make a 2D-ish occupation.
A boundary fractal has an inside and an outside. These are separated by whether the answer to the point plugged into the fractal formula runs recursively away to zero (usually inside) or to infinity (usually outside). Sometimes the fractal programs color the inside and outside fairly interestingly, but the real beauty is always near the boundary itself. So the thing to do is to keep zooming in on boundary. Some fractal progs do this continuously and smoothly by just holding down the mouse button. Most have you drag a zoom rectangle. Many let you save a movie of the zoom sequence. There is a setting in fractal progs, often adjustable, called "iterations" or "computation limit". This is how much detail the computer is assigned to calculate the fractal to. So if you've zoomed way in, but the iterations is low, you'll begin to see rounded edges, because the computer has to approximate. Of course, if you turn the iterations way up, you slow down your computer.
A great basic fractal prog is Aros Fractals. It lets you adjust image size, colors, "flaring" (cycling the color sequence through the image) and iterations. Drag a rectangle to zoom. I discuss other fractal progs with specific features at the end of the post.
homepage and download: http://www.arosmagic.com/
Aros fractals page: http://www.arosmagic.com/Fractals/default.htm
It's freeware!
Polyhedra.
Polyhedra are shapes in space bounded by planes. They're like bubbles with flat sides. Sounds pretty dry, and it is, unless you're weird like me and find this strange esoteric wonder in them. But...
The one really beautiful polyhedra program I've found is called the Stellation Applet. Stellation is taking the original hedron's faces, an extending them out along the planes they're in, until they intersect and form 3D snowflake / chandelier-like crystals. The stellation applet allows you to choose any combination of intersections, just by pushing or not pushing a few buttons when the window finishes loading. If you push only a button or 2, far down a hedron's diagram, you can get a hollow spherical formation of separate shards spinning in perfect choreography. Oh yeah, the prog lets you spin the result with a simple mouse-drag, zoom it, and view it in a variety of 3D formats. Just play with the buttons a lot. Don't even get me started on the colors.
It'll pop up as 5 separate windows: one parent window, 3 windows with scientific stuff in them, and a 3D view window. Pressing start in the parent window gets it going, and clicking a square or 2 in the
"Cells" window puts up some crystalline beauty in the 3D window. Pressing "Select" in the parent window opens up a sixth window from which you can choose a different seed hedron for the stellation. Click away!
homepage: http://www.physics.orst.edu/~bulatov/
Stellation applet view and download page: http://www.physics.orst.edu/~bulatov/polyhedra/stellation_applet/index.html
It's freeware! Freely distributable, and he supplies the source code in another link as well. It is a java program, so to run it offline, you'll need to have the java runtime environment on your computer. Some later OSs come with it already installed, but if you don't have it, it's a free download. On the same page, he offers a link to it: http://www.javasoft.com/j2se/
Kaleidoscopes / Polyhedra.
I couldn't believe when I found Kaleidotile. It must have been added in the second half of '03, because I think I would have found it before then. This just points up the blossoming of freeware. It'll take a solid color or a triangle out of an image that you supply (!) and reflect it across to fill the surface of a hedron, a sphere, a flat plane, or hyperbolically. That last I don't fully understand, but it's still fun to look at. You can set the sphere spinning, you can copy n paste a snapshot of it as a still. You can view it in red & blue 3D.
homepage: http://www.geometrygames.org/
Kaleidotile page: http://www.geometrygames.org/KaleidoTile/index.html
It might need you to drop down to 16 bit color. And it needs a 3D card installed. Most Win98 computers came with that. Business computers might not have.
It's freeware!
Kaleidoscope / Tesselation.
The Silicon Mirror has been around a lot longer. It also can function as a screen saver. It does flat kaleidoscope images off of any image you supply (.bmp, .jpg, or .tif). It has 5 different tiling modes so you can do honeycomb or square tiling, and there's one called 8+ that makes a small part of the tile do infinite recursion. It runs fast and offers great control. You can drag to adjust the size of the tile, a menu-choose the orientation of the seed tile. You can drag its seed location on the image. And if that's not enough, it saves as a .bmp or .jpg so you don't have to copy and paste into another image editor. So cool.
homepage: http://www.torpor.com/
download: http://www.torpor.com/skdown.htm
(shareware: eval, then $12)
Tesselation.
I've got plans eventually for Kali. A while ago in high school, I designed an image of a turtle that interlocked with itself, much inspired by Escher. I went nuts photocopying it. I was pretty proud of myself. Tess, with practice, could be a way to refine that, or more easily create new ones. And certainly, it's easy to make very nice periodic designs with a quick, easy interface. Basically you drag lines, and it automatically repeats them across the screen for you. It has buttons at the bottom for every conceivable tiling pattern. It even lets you do splines, so your designs have a pleasant flowing quality.
homepage: http://www.geometrygames.org/Kali/
--I will continue and give examples on page 2--
My main area of interest has been loosely the connection between mathematics and art. You could also call it the beauty of math, or the order of art. And I'm in luck, because as it happens, one of the probably top 10 strong areas on which the internet has grown is this junction of beautiful numbers. Fractals leap to mind as a good example. Lesser known examples would be polyhedra, integers, and tesselation. Add to that the fact that just doing any kind of art in a digital picture editting program introduces a certain inherent mathness to it.
To date, I have over 300 programs, mostly freeware image editor/makers, installed on my computer. This will be my description of why I've collected them and links with a little bit of review for some of the very best ones. It's my humble hope that the time I've taken searching and acquainting, and gradually knowing what I want and how to get it, will help you enjoy an early foray into this area. I don't have Adobe Photoshop, because I can't afford it - and I may never afford it. Not because I'll never have a spare $700, but rather because buying it would amount to excess or pickyness. It has a lot of very fine photo controls, and brings a lot of more basic ones into one program, but I can acheive all the basic ones in other programs. Like Jasc Paint Shop Pro. That one is about $100, and it is one piece of bought software I am happy to have. It loads quick, never crashes, handles layers, keeps me happy. It's what I used to compose the single example image of ten stills and 5 animations accompanying this post. One or two of the versatile editors I mention even has layer capability.
The examples.
I have provided an example picture for each of the programs I mention. I dashed these off quickly, partly to indicate how easy it is, and partly to show just one filter or program at a time, in isolation. Usually when I work on a raw photo, it goes in and out of programs and filters many times, spawning myriad sub-versions and containing lots of subconcious subtlety. These examples are small, to be better for web viewing. They would be more spectacular from firsthand creation at home. I have put all the examples, including an animation, in a 3rd & 4th post below for web viewing ease. Keep in mind that they look blocky here but the programs they represent are quite capable of hi-res, high quality images.
Platform.
My computer is a Pentium 3 running Windows 98. As a rule, there is plenty of dowloadable software, including freeware, for my platform. Naturally, what I mention here is what I know because it works on that platform. But often, I see in the spec list that it will work back to Win95, forward to the latest Windows, and requires only even the first Pentium, or even 486 processor in some cases. I'd say more than half the time, these authors also offer a Mac version. Much more often if it's shareware. And especially with some of the scientific and / or java ones, they also offer a version for Unix, Linux, or even less known systems.
If you're a beginner to the field, there is no reason why you should have to spend a lot of dough on additional software or hardware for your computer in order just to start playing and find out where you want to take it. And if you will always just want to do an occasional graphic or see something pretty just now and then, well then there will never be any reason to spend a lot. The internet-wide bag-o-tricks is just that good. To that end, that is, a pleasant introduction to easy graphics editting, here are 2 programs' websites. I have these, but I hardly use them because I have Jasc Paint Shop Pro.
Good basic image editors. They are freeware. Image Forge can be bought up to a pro version if desired.
Image Forge:
http://www.cursorarts.com/
Irfanview:
http://www.irfanview.com/
If you are a beginner, my best reccommendation is to download one of those two I just mentioned, plus the screen capturer I mention below, plus Aros, Kali, and the snowflake generator. See their descriptions and sites below.
If you are used to image editors, but just kind of frustrated by them, haven't had time to choose the best yet, I really can't say I have just one reccommended set. It will depend on your particular flavor of intermediacy. But I hope this collection of links will help.
On stability:
Let me tell you, the majority of the problems I've ever had with crashes have come from established, heavy-footprint software by Adobe and Microsoft. But getting down to a level as light and slick as even Jasc PSP has virtually never been a problem. And all these that I list have proven on my system to be just fine. Sometimes Java apps can be tricky and simply not work. I had a problem that turned out to be simple: my older java consoles were trumping the latest one. Easy fix. Rule of thumb: the smaller the better. None of these are annoying adware, either. Gimp has a problem of not having the same habitual structure as most windows programs. It's an issue of missing pieces, rather than inherently unstable or contradictory code. So parts just won't work when it seems like they should. It doesn't make a habit of crashing, however. And perhaps it's my own impatience that causes me to not know why certain pieces are missing. It is a more attention-demanding install.
Fractals.
I'm sure you've al heard of them at least in passing, but have you ever really gotten to enjoy really "navigating" through one? The term fractal has really come to mean to most people what is really called "boundary fractals". They are a closed figure on a 2D plane, except they are poked in ward and outward, even folded, infinitely. It's as if you laid a necklace on a table, and made it into the shape of a star, then put little star arms branching from the original star arms, then did a third scale of star arms, and so on. You'd find you'd have to supply additional length to the necklace. This is because of what's called "fractal dimension" - how tightly folded a figure is. Mathematicians can measure it based on the rules for making a given shape. They can even measure it for coastlines, leaf edges, and other 1D figures that make a 2D-ish occupation.
A boundary fractal has an inside and an outside. These are separated by whether the answer to the point plugged into the fractal formula runs recursively away to zero (usually inside) or to infinity (usually outside). Sometimes the fractal programs color the inside and outside fairly interestingly, but the real beauty is always near the boundary itself. So the thing to do is to keep zooming in on boundary. Some fractal progs do this continuously and smoothly by just holding down the mouse button. Most have you drag a zoom rectangle. Many let you save a movie of the zoom sequence. There is a setting in fractal progs, often adjustable, called "iterations" or "computation limit". This is how much detail the computer is assigned to calculate the fractal to. So if you've zoomed way in, but the iterations is low, you'll begin to see rounded edges, because the computer has to approximate. Of course, if you turn the iterations way up, you slow down your computer.
A great basic fractal prog is Aros Fractals. It lets you adjust image size, colors, "flaring" (cycling the color sequence through the image) and iterations. Drag a rectangle to zoom. I discuss other fractal progs with specific features at the end of the post.
homepage and download: http://www.arosmagic.com/
Aros fractals page: http://www.arosmagic.com/Fractals/default.htm
It's freeware!
Polyhedra.
Polyhedra are shapes in space bounded by planes. They're like bubbles with flat sides. Sounds pretty dry, and it is, unless you're weird like me and find this strange esoteric wonder in them. But...
The one really beautiful polyhedra program I've found is called the Stellation Applet. Stellation is taking the original hedron's faces, an extending them out along the planes they're in, until they intersect and form 3D snowflake / chandelier-like crystals. The stellation applet allows you to choose any combination of intersections, just by pushing or not pushing a few buttons when the window finishes loading. If you push only a button or 2, far down a hedron's diagram, you can get a hollow spherical formation of separate shards spinning in perfect choreography. Oh yeah, the prog lets you spin the result with a simple mouse-drag, zoom it, and view it in a variety of 3D formats. Just play with the buttons a lot. Don't even get me started on the colors.
It'll pop up as 5 separate windows: one parent window, 3 windows with scientific stuff in them, and a 3D view window. Pressing start in the parent window gets it going, and clicking a square or 2 in the
"Cells" window puts up some crystalline beauty in the 3D window. Pressing "Select" in the parent window opens up a sixth window from which you can choose a different seed hedron for the stellation. Click away!
homepage: http://www.physics.orst.edu/~bulatov/
Stellation applet view and download page: http://www.physics.orst.edu/~bulatov/polyhedra/stellation_applet/index.html
It's freeware! Freely distributable, and he supplies the source code in another link as well. It is a java program, so to run it offline, you'll need to have the java runtime environment on your computer. Some later OSs come with it already installed, but if you don't have it, it's a free download. On the same page, he offers a link to it: http://www.javasoft.com/j2se/
Kaleidoscopes / Polyhedra.
I couldn't believe when I found Kaleidotile. It must have been added in the second half of '03, because I think I would have found it before then. This just points up the blossoming of freeware. It'll take a solid color or a triangle out of an image that you supply (!) and reflect it across to fill the surface of a hedron, a sphere, a flat plane, or hyperbolically. That last I don't fully understand, but it's still fun to look at. You can set the sphere spinning, you can copy n paste a snapshot of it as a still. You can view it in red & blue 3D.
homepage: http://www.geometrygames.org/
Kaleidotile page: http://www.geometrygames.org/KaleidoTile/index.html
It might need you to drop down to 16 bit color. And it needs a 3D card installed. Most Win98 computers came with that. Business computers might not have.
It's freeware!
Kaleidoscope / Tesselation.
The Silicon Mirror has been around a lot longer. It also can function as a screen saver. It does flat kaleidoscope images off of any image you supply (.bmp, .jpg, or .tif). It has 5 different tiling modes so you can do honeycomb or square tiling, and there's one called 8+ that makes a small part of the tile do infinite recursion. It runs fast and offers great control. You can drag to adjust the size of the tile, a menu-choose the orientation of the seed tile. You can drag its seed location on the image. And if that's not enough, it saves as a .bmp or .jpg so you don't have to copy and paste into another image editor. So cool.
homepage: http://www.torpor.com/
download: http://www.torpor.com/skdown.htm
(shareware: eval, then $12)
Tesselation.
I've got plans eventually for Kali. A while ago in high school, I designed an image of a turtle that interlocked with itself, much inspired by Escher. I went nuts photocopying it. I was pretty proud of myself. Tess, with practice, could be a way to refine that, or more easily create new ones. And certainly, it's easy to make very nice periodic designs with a quick, easy interface. Basically you drag lines, and it automatically repeats them across the screen for you. It has buttons at the bottom for every conceivable tiling pattern. It even lets you do splines, so your designs have a pleasant flowing quality.
homepage: http://www.geometrygames.org/Kali/
--I will continue and give examples on page 2--