New version of precise plotter drawing machine from Evil Mad Scientist which can draw with almost any pen and with very high precision:
This new AxiDraw has been redesigned from the ground up for high
performance. It features smooth rolling wheels on custom aluminum
extrusions, specially designed for high stiffness and light weight. Its
sturdy, rigid construction gives it finer quality output and in most
applications allows it to operate at up to twice the speed of the previous AxiDraw, which it replaces.
As with the previous version, AxiDraw is a simple, modern, precise, and
versatile pen plotter, capable of writing or drawing on almost any flat
surface. It can write with fountain pens, permanent markers, and other
writing implements to handle an endless variety of applications. Its
unique design features a writing head that extends beyond the body of
the machine, making it possible to draw on objects bigger than the
machine itself.
The tool has been a big creative tool hit this year - here is a video by
Hansje van Halem
demonstrating various visual graphic design examples that can be produced with the machine:
Examples of music created with the assistance of Artificial Intelligence from SONY CSL, which are part of an album release due next year.
The more interesting of the two is Mr Shadow, which is based on works by
Irving Berlin, Duke Ellington, George Gershwin and Cole Porter, yet has some irregular modern touches:
The second example is based on music by The Beatles:
How is it done? What did the machines do, and what did the artist?
1) We set up a database called LSDB.
It contains about 13000 leadsheet from a lot of different styles and
composers (mainly jazz and pop about also a lot of Brazilian, Broadway
and other music styles).
2) The human composer (in this case Benoît Carré, but we are
experimenting with other musicians as well) selected a style and
generated a leadsheet (melody + harmony) with a system called FlowComposer.
For Daddy’s Car, Carré selected as style “the Beatles” and for Mr.
Shadow he selected a style that we call “American songwriters” (which
contains songs by composers like Cole Porter, Gershwin, Duke Ellington,
etc).
3) With yet another system called Rechord the human musician matched some audio chunks from audio recordings of other songs to the generated leadsheets.
4) Then the human musician finished the production and mixing.
Real-time Simulation of Large Elasto-Plastic Deformation with Shape Matching
Graphics research from Nvidia presents method of giving 3D objects realistic elastic properties, inventing virtual play-doh in the process:
Shape matching is a popular method for simulating deformable objects in real time as it is fast and stable at large time steps. Although shape matching can simulate large elastic deformation and ductile fracturing, until now, they are limited to scenarios with relatively small plastic deformation. In this work, we present a method for simulating deformable solids undergoing large plastic deformation and topological changes using shape matching within the position based dynamics (PBD) framework. This expands the versatility of PBD which was previously shown to be able to simulate rigid bodies, liquids, gases, cloth, and deformable solids with moderate plastic deformation. Our novel contributions include local particle re-sampling, cluster re-sampling and skinning of an explicitly tracked surface mesh.
