I was introduced to the work of Haeckel (Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel, to be precise) while attending RISD 10+ years ago. From Wikipedia:

Haeckel was an eminent German biologist, naturalist, philosopher, physician, professor and artist who discovered, described and named thousands of new species, mapped a genealogical tree relating all life forms, and coined many terms in biology, including phylum, phylogeny, ecology and the kingdom Protista. Haeckel promoted and popularized Charles Darwin’s work in Germany and developed the controversial recapitulation theory (”ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”) claiming that an individual organism’s biological development, or ontogeny, parallels and summarizes its species’ entire evolutionary development, or phylogeny.

I became quite fond of his work because I had been exploring similar (looking) ideas with my own work. I was fascinated by Platonic solids and would sketch them in my journal to kill time during art history lectures. I was drawn in by the challenge of trying to reproduce such regular forms using no rulers or measurements. I didn’t realize it at the time, but figuring out how to draw those solids ended up being a nice little primer to learning trig later in life.

Here are a few pages from my art school days.

However, sketching these forms became more and more frustrating because I had to draw them head on with no rotation. My mind couldn’t make sense of it any other way. This created some really sterile illustrations. I liked the results, but they felt very flat.

Recently, while tweaking the magnetic structure code and the corresponding particle systems involved, I figured out how to gain a bit more control. The original code had been about freedom. I allowed the particles to move about and they pretty much got to do what they pleased. This new go around is about controlled restraint. I started to create multiple particle systems (instead of just one global one) and for each system, I am assigning it a small set of rules.

For example:

Big particles, you will slowly gain mass until you lock into place. You are capable of attracting small particles. Each of you must remain a fixed distance from the center of the world and must try to spread yourselves out as evenly as possible.

Small particles, you will repel each other while the big particles attract you. If you happen to collide with a big particle, you are now locked to that particle and must remain x paces from its center at all times. Oh, and you must also remain y paces from the center of the world at all times.

From these simple rules, a large variety of different looks can be created by just randomizing a few variables. You can randomize the x and y, the mass, the charge, and the inertia, to name a few.

Below is a test render.

Self organizing dodecahedron flower from flight404 on Vimeo.

While watching this video, I realized I probably had enough control over the results to create a radiolarian generator. I added a few more rules and was able to get a nice lush variety of results. Below are some images from the first go around. I think there is a great deal of potential.

Once I get some control over all the new variables introduced in this build, I will find a way to randomize them so I can get a unique render every time I hit play. Right now, the code is a bit heavy and producing these 2500×2500 pixel images nearly set my laptop on fire. I don’t have nearly enough constraints built in, so it is not uncommon for me to bring the sketch to a stand still because I have accidentally asked the code to produce several billion new vertices because I pressed the wrong key one too many times.

Lately, I have been working with shaders as much as possible in order to better understand their intricacies and nuances. GLSL is a crazy beast in many ways but it can create some really nice effects and super fast (assuming you know what you are doing, which I pretty much do not).

These images are from a revisitation to my particle engine source code. I am trying to make the source more robust and user friendly but I find I often get distracted by the aesthetics and lose focus on the functionality. As an attempt to officially put aesthetics on the back burner, I thought to myself (quite erroneously), “I know, I will just make it look like crosshatching and then I wont think about it for a while and can focus on the physics n’ stuff.”

Sadly, but not surprisingly, dynamic crosshatching is a mess. I quickly realized I was out of my depth so I settled on this faked crosshatching. I call it faked because it is essentially just a texture that is being accessed in the shader based on the diffuse (or specular) lighting conditions at each pixel. This means tiny spheres will have the same level of detail as large spheres which created the moiré effect you see in the images here. If I understood how to generate and use mip maps, I am guessing I could avoid much of this side effect but I have to say… I really like how they look.

This, of course, means that once again, I am being pulled by the aesthetics and the actual meat of the code is being ignored while I tweak variables in the shaders. Can’t shake the feeling that it is not unlike my original fascination with the lens flare Photoshop filter. I bet shader pros around the world are rolling their eyes at my creations. “Oh look,” they cluck, “That 404 guy finally discovered shader driven moiré crosshatching. Welcome to 2002, douche bag.”

Okay, they probably aren’t that harsh with their words. Probably.

Earlier today, Processing shed its ‘beta’ status to become an official point release. Processing 1.0 has finally arrived and you can download it here. Congratulations Ben and Casey (and all the developers who donated their time to track down bugs and implement features)!

To celebrate this awesome event, I thought I would take a walk down memory lane and visit some of my first projects (from 2003/2004) and show how they have progressed over the last four to five years.

note: Don’t bother downloading the source code listed on these older links. The code is horribly sloppy and wont compile on any version of Processing that isn’t at least three years old.

Ribbons (aka Natzke Ribbons)

One of the first things I did after I downloaded Processing (version 65, I think) was to port over a project I had been exploring with Actionscript 1.0 in Flash. My chief influence at the time was Erik Natzke. He had made a piece with faux 3D ribbons that would flow about the screen and I was instantly impressed with how he was able to achieve such a nice effect from a relatively small amount of code.

Porting the code to Processing was easy. It (and Java) are similar enough to AS1.0 that it took only a couple hours to get a version working, and a couple more hours after that to flesh out the aesthetics. It actually ended up being easier because I suddenly had access to a proper z-axis so faking the 3D was no longer necessary. I could do actual (well, actual virtual) 3D.

Here is one of the original ports.

And here is a recent version which uses many of the same processes.

Flocking

Processing is where I first came across Perlin Noise. There was this new vague noise method and I had NO IDEA what it did. After some research and experimentation, I realized that I could use this noise method to create flowfields and with these flowfields, I could simulate flocking behavior fairly cheaply.

Below is one of my first flocking experiments. Several hundred objects are swimming around in a three dimensional (the third dimension is time) flowfield.

And to this day, I still use Perlin noise to simulate flocking behaviors. The Birds piece I worked on with Nervo uses noise flowfields to control the movement of the birds. The code got a bit more sophisticated and implements some collision avoidance, but it is essentially the same code from years before.

Spheres

I have always been and will continue to be impressed with the simple sphere. Such a basic shape, so easy to visualize but so complex to code. Early in my Processing experience, I decided I wanted to learn what translate, push and pop were capable of. I had no previous experience with these methods borrowed from OpenGL but I soon realized it was a necessary stepping stone to better understanding how to experiment with objects in 3D space. I stumbled upon a pseudo-code explanation which used the idea of a solar system to help explain these methods. Start from the sun, push a new matrix onto the stack and translate out to place Mercury. Pop back to the sun and push and translate out to Venus, etc.

Here is my initial attempt. You will notice that the sun (left of center) has a highlight from a phantom invisible sun because I couldn’t figure out how to make a sphere glow. My love affair with additive blending hadn’t yet arrived and my understanding of OpenGL lighting was nearly nonexistent.

A few years later, I have come to understand some of the intricacies of working with spheres and my love for additive blending is in full bloom.

Magnetism

And this brings us to my ultimate distraction: Magnetism. I first started wondering about how to code magnetism when I got my hands on some ferromagnetic fluid (the now ubiquitous black goo that can form spikes when exposed to magnetic fields). I was puzzled by the positioning of the spikes and I wanted to know why (how) they moved about so beautifully. I did some reading and quickly realized I was out of my league. Thanks to the fine folks frequenting the Processing forum, I was able to get some great information. This post, in particular, set me down the path to what would eventually turn into the magnetosphere series of projects.

Here is how it all began. When I was able to get these circular objects to spread out and situate themselves using the properties of magnetic attraction and repulsion, I became officially hooked.

Since that moment, magnetism has played a major role in nearly all of the work that has followed. Here is a still from a video I did last year. It is at its base nothing more than a magnetic particle sandbox. These particles move about based on the strength of their magnetic charges, but these charges are changing as a direct result of audio input.

5 years later

I am deeply indebted to Casey and Ben for all the hard work they have put into Processing. It is such a treat to see it grow over the last few years. Originally, I thought Processing was interesting and would be a nice diversion from the Flash work I was focused on. However, the more I worked with Processing, the more I saw it to be much more than a coding sketch pad. You can read more about my experiences with Processing in an interview I did with Casey which has been recently posted on the Processing site.

A few years ago, I met Joshua Davis. Not the Praystation dude, rather the 8-bit musician who goes by the name Bitshifter. Josh and I were both at the 2005 FITC conference in Toronto. A friend had arranged an evening of performance at a church that had been turned into a venue. Since Josh wasn’t quite sure what he wanted for visuals and I had no idea how to do visuals without audio, we teamed up. His peanut butter with my chocolate.

It was my first experience with live VJing and it went well enough. I put up some documentation a while back here. Since that evening went well, we teamed up again to do a music video for an original track Josh wrote. It was included on the Sonic Acts XI • The Anthology of Computer Art DVD. Happily, Bitshifter has uploaded a version of it to Vimeo because I honestly don’t think I have a copy of it anymore. Probably gathering dust on an external harddrive somewhere.

Bit Shifter & Flight404 • “Feedback” / “Flight Risk” from Bit Shifter on Vimeo.

It is interesting to go back and see the work I was happy with 3.5 years ago. Very different feel, but still adhering to some basic tenets of which I am fond: Single render pass with no post production, entirely code driven, and tending to favor simple palettes.

A few months ago, the Barbarian Group was approached by Erasmus to help with promotions for the Relentless Energy Drink. Relentless, available only in the UK, is a frequent sponsor of music festivals and sports competitions. They asked us to make an audio visualizer that would run in real-time so they could show it at these venues. In addition to the live application, they wanted a content creation version and an iTunes plugin version. The content creation version would allow them to create renders from recorded audio and the iTunes version would allow members of the Relentless Order to experience it on their own computers.

The project went through many different looks. The primary art direction we received was that the end result should be dark and should have some baroque sensibilities. We did our best to hit these goals and we are quite proud of the end result.

Learning Experience
For me, the most rewarding part of this job was that I learned a whole lot. Fellow Barbarian, Andrew Bell, showed me many interesting tricks, not to mention working his ass off to optimize this project so it would run at 30+ fps and also handling the port to C++ for the iTunes visualizer version.

The early versions had the primary tendrils rendered as flat strips that always orient themselves towards the camera so you never (well, almost never) see the strips from the side. This was my way of faking the viewer into believing they were seeing a solid mass. However, this method had its problems. It was impossible to texture map it in an interesting way, and occasionally, the strip would twist a full 360° which added unsightly kinks. Andrew suggested we move to actual tubes instead of strips and I thought he was nuts. The piece was already starting to drag down the framerate and he wanted to add more geometry?? Nuts, I tell ya!!

A couple days later, he showed me the new build. I was floored. Not only did he do what he promised, but he improved the frame-rate in the process AND he added support for shaders. Awesome!

BEFORE:

AFTER:

Suddenly, things got a lot more interesting… more lush. He ended up switching the tendril geometry over to VBOs (vertex buffer objects) which sped things up a great deal. He also pre-cached the texture coordinates because they didn’t actually change once the piece was up and running.

The Birds

The idea of flocking crows or ravens is very much in keeping with the Relentless aesthetic but there was some concern that we were simply repurposing a project we did with Nervo for Fox Movies. We decided to do away with everything we did for Nervo and start from scratch. The original Nervo piece relied on using 160 flat images of a 3D bird in flight. For the Relentless version, we switched over to actual 3D birds (admittedly quite rudimentary). Each bird was made up of 12 polygons. The wings actually flapped and they could be viewed from any angle (whereas the Nervo version worked best when the birds were viewed side-on.

The Background

From the beginning we were instructed to do away with the notion of an infinite black or white space. The entire scene should be filled with content and this proved to be quite the challenge. Originally, we just dropped the whole scene inside a large textured sphere but the end result was lacking. Andrew came up with the idea of using a flat plane as the background but by using some FBO trickery, he was able to make these beautiful flourished textures bleed into view. I still have no idea how he pulled it off but the effect is quite stunning. Later he added a dynamic light source to make the scene feel even more dark and slightly disturbing.

The (faked) Volumetric Lighting

After we settled on the look, we wanted to make it seem like the invisible center of the mass of tendrils was a hidden light source. Earlier versions actually had the tendrils glowing near their base but the look of shadow and silhouette was more intriguing so we killed the glow and added faked volumetric lighting. The light beams themselves behave as if they were magnetic particles. Each one is born, lives for a predetermined amount of time, then fades out and dies. While they are alive, they repulse each other if they get too close. This created a really nice organic movement which made it seem like the movement of the tendrils actually caused the light beams to form or disappear. Combined with the background lighting, the effect became quite engaging.

The Content Creation Tool
Erasmus wanted to be able to create renders from pre-recorded pieces of music so we tweaked the live version to accommodate the loading in of external audio as well as an XML file of adjustable variables. By modifying the XML file, they could run the application and customize their experience. Every graphic element could be toggled individually. So if you want a video with no background for compositing, or perhaps you want to leave the birds out, just tweak the XML and run the application. Additionally, since we were no longer confined to creating an experience that ran live in real-time, you could up the amount of objects as high as your memory will allow. This is how we made the following test render. The bird and particle count was turned up really high, as was the detail on the tendril geometry.

The following video is a test render from The REV content creation tool. Please note this is not an official Relentless video. This is simply a test render we did to make sure the audio responsiveness was as we liked it. The audio is by The Flashbulb (”Six Months Without Light” off the album Kirlian Selections) but be aware that The Flashbulb has no affiliation with Relentless. The chosen audio was simply a test track. I chose The Flashbulb because he is my favorite artist to audio visualize and I love this track.

Relentless, The REV from flight404 on Vimeo.

Or you can view the much higher resolution Quicktime here. Note, it is around 300Mb.

The REV iTunes Version
As I mentioned above, there is a free downloadable version for iTunes. You can find out more at the Relentless Energy site. Have at it!

Not a new idea here, but it was still fun to make. While in NYC last week, I spoke at the Boards Summit. They asked if Andrew Bell and I would give a talk on Processing. I made the following demo because I wanted an easy way to showcase what Processing can handle in real-time and also wanted a way to segue into showing off a couple audio-visual pieces I made a while back.

I decided to just start with the standard FFT waveform. I figured it was something the audience (of mostly advertising folks) might be familiar with. The point was to show that the raw FFT data can be a bit unruly with tons of seesaw and spikes. First I pointed out the FFT data is heavily biased towards the lower frequencies which presents itself as a sharp falloff as you go from low to high. As a quick fix, I multiplied the FFT data by a section of a sine wave and leveled off the data. This put the majority of the action in the middle of the waveform instead of the left side.

I then applied an averaging pass which smoothed out a lot of the spikes. Next, a decay attack and falloff was added to keep the spikes from popping in and out too frantically. Finally, I threw the whole data set into a 2D ripple algorithm to give the whole thing a bit more of an organic feel (one of these days, Id like to retranslate this back into audio to see what it might sound like).

Suddenly, the once frantic FFT data was turned into smooth rolling peaks that still reflected the quality of the incoming audio. The look was somewhat landscapey so I decided to push that aesthetic by showing the history of the audio (in the video example below, I am keeping track of the last four seconds of audio). I then added in some appropriate textures and got a nice scrolling landscape that responding fine to real-time audio input. It is particularly entertaining to swing the camera around to the back of the passing landscape and turn it into a rudimentary flight simulator over dynamically generated, audio driven landscape.

Audio-generated landscape from flight404 on Vimeo. Definitely recommend seeing the HD version on vimeo.com. Audio by Akufen (”Even White Horizons” off the album My Way).

And yeah, it does look a bit Bryce3D. Next time, maybe I will even throw in some crystal spheres rising out of a mountain lake! Retro-Awesome!!

(My apologies if the previous description is both too simple and too complex. I don’t actually know much about FFT and how it is derived. I know what the data looks like and that is plenty for me to play around with it.)

I have always hated New York City. I was never able to see the charm. I have only been there a handful of times and I am always overjoyed when it is time to return to San Francisco. New York City is for the young. New York City is for the patient. I am neither.

However, this most recent trip was different. On this trip, I tried to loosen up and appreciate the pros and do my best to ignore the cons. This was no easy chore but I think I succeeded. I spent time with my beloved East Coast friends. I ate at several fantastic restaurants. I saw some amazing art installations. The weather was perfect. This was the New York City all my friends told me about and I finally got to see it with my own jaded eyes. But of all the experiences I had this last week, there is one that stands out. A single moment that made the rest of the week pale in comparison. It was the moment I realized Paul Smith owed me an apology.

It started simply enough. Lance told me we should swing by the Paul Smith store in SoHo because there was something he wanted me to see. A little background is probably necessary here. Paul Smith is Lance’s favorite fashion designer. He even based one of his blog designs on the iconic Paul Smith stripes. Before I met Lance, I hadn’t even heard of Paul Smith. Lance showed me his genius. A short while later, I bought my first and only suit. It was a Paul Smith and I love it immensely.

We wandered down the hyper crowded cobblestone streets of SoHo-on-a-weekend and made our way to the Paul Smith boutique. We don’t have a Smith store in San Francisco so I was looking forward to seeing his collections in person. Lance led me over to a shelf and pointed at a long sleeved shirt. (just noticed the website refers to it as a sweater… but its pretty much a sweat shirt). It was red with a print of flocking birds in white. “This reminded me of your work.”

It really did. I snapped a picture with my iPhone and put it out of my mind. It was a nice print reminiscent of my work and nothing more. We left empty handed. Back at the hotel room, I pulled out my iPhone and looked at the photo again. It bugged me that it seemed so familiar. Plenty of people have done flocking experiments with code but I have come to find that the personality of the coder is often reflected in the flocking behavior exhibited by the birds. My flocking code differs from Psyop’s. Psyop’s differs from Reynolds’. And so on.

I opened up my laptop and made my way to my Flickr account. I looked over the three images I posted last year of hundreds of birds in flight that I made with Processing. At first, I saw no direct relationship. The Smith design simply looked like another iteration of the work I had done. It nagged at me. It seemed implausible that someone else could have come up with a flocking behavior that had so many aesthetic similarities to mine. Then I saw it. A circle shaped negative space on the edge of a half-circle of flocking birds. This detail was present in both.

“Oh my god oh my god oh my god…”

“What? What is it?”

“I think Paul Smith stole my work!”

I pointed out the detail to Lance who confirmed my suspicion. The more we looked, the more the neighboring details fell into place. Smith’s version was mirrored left to right so I loaded the image in Photoshop and flipped it. “Oh my god! He totally stole my work!” I was dancing around the room. “Paul Smith stole from me!” I will admit it was a strange reaction. I didn’t realize this until later in the day. I was actually thrilled that someone had ripped me off. Someone I liked. That sincerest form of flattery bit doesn’t mean much if the person doing the imitating is making shit work.

“We have to go back!”

“Why?”

“I have to buy it and I want to take better pictures so I can be sure.”

Back at the store, one of the salesmen recognized us from our earlier visit. He asked if he could help us. I pointed at the shirt and said I wanted one. He sized me up as a large and grabbed a couple and led me to the changing room.

“If the arms are too short, we can find you another one.”

I put the shirt on and it fit fine. I couldn’t stop smiling. The whole thing was so damned surreal. Here I am in a Paul Smith changing room trying on a shirt that features a design element stolen from my Flickr site!

“It fits perfectly,” I told the salesman. “It’s like I made it myself,” I joked and smiled at Lance.

“You did make it yourself,” the man replied, oblivious to the inside joke but wanting to play along.

Lance asked the salesman if he knew anything about the print on the shirt. He said something about hobos and the passing of knowledge or something. I was too distracted to pay attention. I said I will take it and he led us to the cashier. $235 later, I was walking out of the store with my very own personalized Paul Smith shirt.

Back at the hotel, I took a couple more pictures with Lance’s camera. I loaded them into Photoshop, flipped them horizontally, and overlaid my image. I had to scale and rotate mine a tiny bit but easily found it to be a pixel perfect match.

In the following two images, cyan represents a perfect match between my content and the shirt content. White represents parts that were cropped out of my original image. The remainder of the red is from content added that isn’t part of my original image. So basically, cyan birds with red glows are stolen.

Amazing, right?! So many circumstances had to line up perfectly for me to even know about this design theft. My boyfriend happens to be a Paul Smith junkie. We both happened to be in New York City around the same time this article was released. Lance and our friend Tara both had to wander into the Paul Smith store. They both needed to be familiar enough with my work to notice the similarity and agree that I should probably see it with my own eyes. All the planets aligned.

Later that evening, Lance, Tara and I went out to dinner at Cookshop. I wore the new Paul Smith shirt. How could I not! At one point during the meal, I went to the mens room. As I stood at the sink, I looked up at the mirror and saw my collaboration with Paul Smith. I couldn’t stop laughing. Processing on a Paul Smith shirt! Casey and Ben are going to love this.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I must admit I am not completely innocent in all this. The birds I used in my coding study were culled from other people’s Flickr photos. I didn’t ask permission. I searched Flickr for images of flocking birds and traced a total of seven small silhouettes which I used in the original flocking study. However, I did not then go on to print my versions on clothing and sell them for hundreds of dollars each.

So what now? I have no idea. I am not angry. I am not feeling vindictive. I am flattered and amused. This isn’t like that Urban Outfitters/Johnny Cupcakes incident. I don’t actually feel wronged. I do feel that some designer for the Paul Smith brand committed an embarrassing act of laziness. This should not be excused and I imagine they will be dealt with accordingly. I don’t get a ton of blog traffic but I would be surprised if this didn’t eventually get back to the Paul Smith organization. And Mr. Smith, if you are reading this, Lance and I have always wanted to spend a week in London. Oh, and I am a 42L.

View larger image on my Flickr page.

Those that know me know I am a sucker for multitudes. Many of anything intrigues me more than single things ever could. So it wouldn’t be much of a surprise to find out that I took 2925 dice and formed them into a bitmap image of the Madonna. Thats the Madonna, and not just plain ol’ Madonna.

For those interested in the process, it is quite simple.

Step 1: Get drunk on martinis and buy a shit-load of dice from Amazon.
Step 2: Wait one week. Arrival!
Step 3: Think of an image you don’t mind spending several hours immortalizing.
Step 4: Size the image and make it 6-color grey scale.

Step 5: Select each of the colors, from darkest to brightest, and recolor the pixels to something more contrasty (I used ROY-G-BIV for mine).

Step 6: Depending on the size of the image, you will want to make a system for dealing with small sections at a time. I chose to do 5×5 squares.

Step 7: Make sure you keep track of which parts of the image you have done already because trying to go back in and find where you left off can be tricky.
Step 8: Photograph and post results on Flickr and blog so you can show dozens of strangers just how little you have to do on a Saturday night.
Step 9: Rest.

Image from Rob Chiu’s fantastic FOTB trailer. So fuckin awesome that my name was attacked by seagulls.

Another conference come and gone. And what a conference it was. Easily the most memorable and probably the most enjoyable of all the conferences I have had attended.

Firstly, many thanks to John Davey for exceeding my expectations once again. He is a gracious host and a good friend and I look forward to the future events that he helms. Well done.

Secondly, to Karim Rashid and Andy Thrasyvoulou, please tone it down a bit. They are the two designers of myhotel Brighton which is where the speakers were housed. Don’t get me wrong. As far as hotels go, it was decent but there were some silly and downright horrible design decisions that made it a miss. Especially with the bathroom. For some reason, there was no mirror above the sink, which was located in a curved space. The mirrors were to either side of the sink so you needed to push up against the sink and turn to the side to even see yourself. But most annoyingly, the mirror’s placement afforded me unexpected and unrequested views of my growing bald-spot. That isn’t what you want in a bathroom vanity. You want luxury and utility, but mostly, you want it to make you feel attractive. This room gave you a sneak attack view of a really unfortunate angle. Damn you Karim and Andy. Damn you both.

Thirdly, thanks to all that attended my talk. You were a really responsive audience and for that I am grateful. There seems to be some disconnect between American audiences and those abroad. I find that with my talks in America, the audience tends to wait until the end before applauding. But the Brits were very happy to applaud every time they experienced something they liked. This made the act of speaking to a large group much easier and much more comfortable. Probably didn’t hurt that most of them had a beer in hand because I was the final ‘Inspiration Session’ which occurred late in the day.

Fourthly, to the speakers, it is always a treat to spend time with you. It is odd to feel so close to people that I only see maybe once or twice a year, and sometimes much more infrequently than that. The last time I saw James Paterson and Andries Odendaal was maybe about five years ago but we picked back up like it had only been a couple months.

You are very much the reason I agree to speak at these Flash-centric conferences. It is a pleasure to spend time with you and I am consistently impressed by the quality of work that you showcase during your sessions.

I tend to avoid trying new things until the last minute. I usually have to be dragged kicking and pouting into new technology or a new way of thinking. However, if I need to learn something new for a client, though I will still kick and pout, I find the threat of a shitty deadline is just the thing to allow me to dive into something new.

JBox2D is the new thing that is occupying my time these days. Co-worker Andrew explained to me that there is no need to try to build a physics engine when there are so many decent ones out there already. Find some sturdy shoulders to stand on and enjoy the view.

I will admit, the view is quite nice. Getting someone else to do the heavy lifting required by collision detection and handling is quite a freeing feeling. And its so fast too! And little-to-no jitter!

Attraction from flight404 on Vimeo.

Best to see the HD version on Vimeo. There are seven videos from this exploration posted so far. Sadly, Vimeo is being a bitch lately. Now it refuses to show that I have uploaded seven new videos. But if you do a search for ‘jbox2d’, it should show you the seven that I have posted.