Scott Draves software and artwork updates, public appearances, photographs, and mindless link propagation.
|
300 Amazing Computer Generated Images (and can become your screensaver) http://digg.com/design/300_Amazing_Computer_Generated_Images_and_can_become_your_screensaver Electric Sheep is a free, open source screen saver run by thousands of people all over the world. It can be installed on any ordinary PC or Mac. When these computers "sleep", the screen saver comes on and the computers communicate with each other by the internet to share the work of creating morphing abstract animations known as "sheep". savingadvice savingadvice submitted 1 day 21 hours ago in Design electricsheep.org 1. savingadvice +11 main page for screensaver info: http://www.electricsheep.org/ 1. ifonly -22 Who the hell uses screensavers these days? 2. caddoo -14 Losers called Jack Anyway I agree with WomunOfColour it is very distracting. 3. dshPls -13 I'd rather get punched in the balls than look at fractals...this shit is exactly what went wrong with DeviantART. Kids figured they could make pseudo art with a program, and flooded the gallerys with that and chuck norris "sigs" Fractal design is the crux of those without creativity. 4. kLacK +0 Now if only the screen saver would change my resolution to the match the resolution of the video it wouldn't look so grainy! 5. Ryosen +12 @dshPls Really? Try programming them sometime. And I'm not referring to Mandelbrots and Julians, either. Try some procedural texturing and cloud generation, both of which draw on fractals, or fire, smoke and land formations. Then come back and tell us how it doesn't require any talent or creativity. In the meantime, I'll be more than happy to help you out with the getting kicked in the balls part. 6. mrsaturn +4 @dhsPls Fractals are hardly what "went wrong" with DeviantArt--at least they can be aesthetically pleasing. On the other hand, the huge influx of amateur anime, furry, and inflation (search for it) "art" much earlier in devart's history are what I would largely blame for its downfall. Then again, I've seen devart assaulted by a variety of artistically questionable scourges and trends over the years. 7. mrsaturn +2 @Ryosen dhsPLS wasn't talking about programming fractal generators, he was talking about using them to produce art. All you have to do is tweak the variables until you come up with something that looks cool. It's a big shortcut to producing abstract art. Then again I wouldn't say that Pollock's work was technically challenging to make either, but it is still highly regarded by many. That said, Photoshop makes it trivial to perform hundreds of different techniques that would otherwise be extremely difficult or impossible to do by hand. Is that cheating? Does it matter? Are the visual aesthetics not the same regardless of the methods employed? 8. shmatt -2 To an extent. Some of these are nice, but I still think a fractal is a fractal. It's a really cool way to express equations, it is not in any way an expression outside of mathematics. If want to call it art, you can, but I define art as human expression, not a machine doing calculations To each their own, I havent thumbed anyone down for liking this stuff. 9. MeatBiProduct +1 programming itself is considered a fine art - look it up. 2. WomunOfColour +16 I had Electric Sheep as my screensaver for a while, but then I realized it was very distracting and lowered my productivity. You can vote up or vote down 'sheep' by pressing the up or down button, respectively. Everyone's votes work as a sort of natural selection, weeding out the bad sheep and propagating the good ones. There are also random mutations, so the sheep keep evolving into more beautiful fractals. It's like a giant neural network. 1. weprin +6 I think there is a lot of untapped potential here. Voting on the prettiest animation is only just one small use of this technique for using the collective inputs of thousands (potentially millions!) of people to maintain heuristics. 2. senfo +13 @weprin I think you might be on to something. Somebody should invent a social networking website that lets its its members digg or bury stories posted by other members of the site. Why hasn't anybody thought of this before!!? 3. gwinerreniwg +4 I had problems with it sucking up all of my home-network's bandwidth when one of the PCs wasin screen saver mode. After a few weeks of weird performance issues, I finally narrowed it down to Electric Sheep as the culprit. As cool as the "sheep" look, I've uninstalled for this reason. 4. Osiriscky3 +1 actually it uses Bit Torrent which if you had looked in the preferences once you would have noticed that you could change the programs bandwidth usage. Maybe uninstall was more up your alley. 3. dusco -26 looks like some crap some kid made. 1. ardenr +7 Haha, I wish I could see the look on your kid's face when he comes home from Kindergarted, and you tell him that. Anyway, kids grow up, (most of them at least), so does this. Way to miss the point. 2. mtappenden +7 I saw a kid once 4. Tordenflesk +1 Ah, reminds me of when i first discovered digg (Hint: this is ooold) 1. akira117 +1 Ditto this is very old, but deserves the fount page since it is such a good program. 2. underrun -1 It's nnnnew to me so digg. I evaluated the fact that the site has existed for a while but realized quickly that I didn't care. 3. Osiriscky3 +0 STFU NOOB 5. anicejew -18 This is very creepy that computers are becoming smart enough to create artificial art. 1. Tordenflesk +9 Not really, It's just bunch of random 3d-rendering. 2. TroubleInMind -8 Computers can't create anything. They are passive machines. Software engineers create things. Sometimes they are crap. Like this is. 3. DreKor +5 They're not being smart at all. These computers, like all others, are just following their algorithms. The intelligence in this model comes from people voting these "sheep" up or down (a la digg). If people like something that the computer has made then the computer keeps doing that. If people dislike it, then they tell the computer to change a variable and resubmit the "sheep" for approval. 4. codemonkey2841 +2 It isn't technically art in the classical sense of the word, they are fractals which are simply mathematically generated patterns. 5. IzeasGT +0 This is what, the third time I've recommended Out of Control on Digg? Good stuff. Read it. http://www.kk.org/outofcontrol/contents.php 6. drwtsn32 -10 ........... 7. trp642 -2 http://duggmirror.com/design/300_Amazing_Computer_Generated_Images_and_can_become_your_screensaver/ 8. Mininday -3 http://www.duggmirror.com 9. goltoof -2 Sounds interesting, i could use a new wallpaper. But the site won't load for me :( 10. SOAB +2 Gezzzzzzz it's back... :-/ It's been here, done that. http://digg.com/software/PCs_Dream_Of_Electric_Sheep Still cool though. 11. ez4me2c3d -2 Dugmirror.com only shows thumbnails, not really a practical way to preserve this type of art. 12. adragontattoo +2 awesome program, I have been using it for a few years on different PC's. A few of the teachers at my job use it to teach with. 1. fac51 +2 Agreed, I have Electric Sheep on all of my PC's and it's fantastic. Some of the designs are truly beautiful to watch and as they change over time and the 'sheep ' come and go you will never get bored of any one screensaver. Also the fact you can use the up and down keys to vote on each saver (if you wish) means that bad looking designs go away quicker. all in all a big thumbs up from me! 13. aelias +4 Wish the app ran in Hi-Res. :( Bonus points for using bit torrent as a distribution model for the algorithm. I've been running this for months, and am continually pleased with what it spits out. It's constrained evolution mixed with democracy. They should try this in Washington. 14. mattloaf1 +9 Anyone notice that most people call their desktop background their "screensaver"? 1. xmetal2001 +3 If you are referring to electric sheep, it IS a screen saver. Check out the whole site. 15. tikitechi -3 I was going to say the same thing, since when did Wallpaper (YOUR DESKTOP BACKGROUND IMAGE) become a "ScreenSaver" If anything wallpapers were screenkillers back in the day as they were the cause of many a burned CRT :) Hence the need for a ScreenSaver or MOVING image Monitor blanker. I remember I had this monitor in a server room that clearly had a picture of someones dog burned into it, looked kinf of creepy. 1. PDubNYC +6 Electric Sheep IS A SCREEN SAVER. The thumbnails are just snapshots of the various designs it does. But thanks for the history lesson 2. WarpFox +4 electric sheep is defidently a screensaver. although I constantly hear people using incorrect terminoligy like "my internet provider? i use internet explorer." or "can you download that to a disk for me?" I dont think this was the case in this instance :) 3. tikitechi +2 Good examples too. No one knows the word upload. Another good one is I am always being asked to "download the latest version of office to my CPU" CPU and PC seem to be interchangable to people, even when I subtly correct them by then referring to the PC as a PC, they keep using CPU. We have quite a few people who dont understand that the monitor and the PC are two different things. As in "Is your pc on?" :) Im sure we could all go on and on about this and write a book ANyway, I know its a screensaver, and a good one. Just musing on silliness that the story made me think of. 4. mikesbaker +0 i was doing a lot of dvd creation and of course had to leave the computer running for a long time. the program that I used burned into my LCD. Thankfully after a couple of days it went away but for a while I thought that I would have to buy a new monitor. 5. doctorcaligari +2 @tikitechi Alot of people at my job call the computer a "modem". I get calls like "my modem won't take my password" while I sit there and try to figure out what they are talking about. 16. weprin +13 1. invader +1 speechless? c'mon.. they're not _that_ """Amazing"""... 2. Quadduc +1 I laughed. 17. OrlyonokEaglet -2 this is terrible, digg should show different front page stories to different visitors or something, every link is dead slow 1. munkyxtc +0 yeah, it's been sitting here just spinning its wheels for over 5 mins 18. leberama -2 OK, I'm getting tired of front page stories that can not support the traffic. I'm clicking on bury. 1. underrun +0 Try clicking on Google cache or a download mirror. It might be a better use of your time. http://www.majorgeeks.com/electric_sheep_d4547.html 19. kaniz +3 This is a great screen saver, been running it for a long time now. The only problem is that it can become a bit distracting at times. There has been a few times I've been watching TV or a Movie and caught a glimpse of my screen in the distance and ended up spacing out on the screen saver for a few mins and ignoring whatever I was watching before. I had quite a few gigs worth of the sheep downloaded, so there were lots of really smooth transitions / etc between loops and didn't see the same things repeated too often. 20. BarriedaleNick +1 Other download link if you are interested.. http://downloads.megagames.com/screensavers/electricsheep-2.6.6.exe 21. TheMadCow +1 I wish we could vote to bury all the pissing whiners who have nothing better to do but bitch and whine about this thing or that thing not being what they want... Digg is like some horrible anti-crack, you have to read comments - but you want to strangle the sh*t out of 90% of the assclowns posting. 1. underrun -2 That might be a type of thread troll spawn. Do they have a name yet? I'm not creative enough to think of one...uh...."assclowns"? 22. boomwad +0 how long does it take for the first "sheep" to download? I've been waiting quite some time...? 1. Osiriscky3 +1 soon my child soon... 23. Quadduc +1 The stills are nothing to the animations. The animated "sheep" are truly fascinating. My only complaint is that the animations are a bit noisy (a result of the rendering method). Noise adds unnecessary complexity to the data, which results in less efficient video compression. If the animations are rendered with more iterations (requiring more CPU time), they will have less noise. That's not a reason not to try it out, though. I will keep this one as my choice of screensaver for some time.Posted by spot at December 27, 2006 10:19 PM