Pruney Fingers
Pruney Fingers is a picturebook project started in 2012. This projection mapped piece is a prototype where I animated three original drawings from the book. All rights reserved © 2021 Yeonhee Choi
produced by: Yeonhee Choi
Introduction
This project is visually based on three drawings from my picture book. I chose the drawings which include fun and playful elements to animate: a girl's blushing face, balloons, a sweat drop, waterstream from the shower, water waves, jumping legs on the trampoline, the girl walking while a bunch of snacks falling down to the ground from top of the building.
Concept and background research
The concept of this project is to create an animated, projection mapped version of my drawings. All visual elements are taken from, or inspired by the original drawings in my book.
Technical
I mainly used ofNoise, Vector, for Loops, Sin and others.
I especially used the ofNoise technique most often to create the natural, smooth, organic movements of balloons gradually getting bigger and smaller with some noise, as well as of the sweat drop running down the blushing face. To create the bathroom tiles as well as the surface of building, I used for Loops. For drawing the snacks falling down, I used Vector.
The challanging part was to set the right locations of generative animation effects on the loaded images, so they look naturally synchronised. I had to manually find the exact locations for each effect, like I did for the Make a Forgery assignment. Whenever I made any changes, I had to manually find the new locations all over again. I tried to search if there's an automatic or quicker way to do it, but haven't found any alternative solutions yet.
Future development
I chose only three drawings out of 32 drawings. I’m planning to animate other drawings to create an animated picture book. I found some interesting addons for more realistic water texture, but couldn’t use them in this project due to the restriction. I’d like to try more addons in the future.
I’d also love to try the Openframeworks Unity plugins to add more powerful animations and interactions to my picture book using both Openframeworks and Unity.
Self evaluation
I created most of the animation effects I set out to achieve, even thought they are not perfect. I'm planning to keep working on them. I realised OF is simpler, yet powerful and effective to create animation with code, comparing to other heavy, complicating animation tools I've tried.
One thing I couldn't achieve was to load building signs from the original drawing in the background. The loaded 2D image looks great on the flat screen window, but got distorted on the 3D surfaces as the original drawing was already drawn in perspective. I ended up removing it after numerous attempts to maniputate the original drawing on both OF and Photoshop.
Another thing I was struggling with was to learn how to make each scene starts from its beggining, as they kept starting from the middle even though they were set to start from its beggining. It took quite a lot of time to manage it using Scene Manager, and ofResetElapsedTimeCounter() in the reset function following an advice on the forum.
References
some of my codes are based on the lab/home assignment templates and lecture videos.
I've also got help from below :
https://openframeworks.cc/ofBook/chapters/OOPs!.html
https://openframeworks.cc/ofBook/chapters/animation.html
https://openframeworks.cc/documentation/utils/ofUtils/#show_ofResetElapsedTimeCounter
https://learn.gold.ac.uk/mod/forum/search.php?id=16022&search=scene+manager