Here world, try your hand at buildings.

You can now use Google Building Maker to model buildings in Google Earth.

Well you model by aligning blocks over the top of satellite photos and having those textures projection mapped onto the blocks. But there is something really smart about the user interface that's shown off in the video.

When in doubt add more polys

Tessellate test on Evolving Geometry from matt ditton on Vimeo.

More tests, this time on the effect of tessellation on the geometry. Thanks for JohnK for the idea. I quite like low-fi polygons. But seeing the higher res version is quite nice. The full description is on the vimeo page.

Evolving Geometry. Or what I did with my Sunday.

Evolving Geometry from matt ditton on Vimeo.

For my first attempt at making a genetic algorithm, is there any better subject than the Mona Lisa and some random dude from google image search?

The premise is simple. By randomly changing the color, position and diagonal edge direction of a grid of polygons can you turn it into the target image.

All written in Processing, the grid draws to a PGraphic on every change and a fitness test is done against the target image. If the fitness is better than or equal the change is kept. If not, it's reverted. Keeping the equal-to in the test causes that crazy vertex movement in the lower image, so that bugs going.

The left image is the grid with vertex colour, the right is the target and the middle is the wireframe of the polygons. The number is the fitness. The lower the number the closer tobeing an exact match.

This is the slowed down version for making a video. I've got it running in a thread and it's stupid fast. But because I'm drawing in the thread I'm getting colour sync errors in the main draw thread. It works fast but the flashing colours get pretty distracting.

Inspiration for this work has to go to Karl Sims and Roger Alsing. They are the giants, I'm just standing here.

No. It wasn't a mistake.

48hr Game Challenge from Monkey Something

I've just had the best weekend I've had all year. I got 5 hours sleep. I ate nothing but crap (apart from Kieran's pies). I lost it in front of some students, and we made a damn cute game.

This is Thunderheads Garden. You play a happy raincloud in the garden of the mad giant Thunderhead. You spend your days growing sunflowers and watching the happy bunnies multiply. But when Thunderhead gets angry he flips the world to hate and you have to use the flowers as a gasoline trail to wipe out the evil bunnies.

So it's like a family game. And it's for 3 players.

I'll get a web version uploaded after another nap.

Can I make a game in 48 hours?

This could be a mistake.

Almost on a dare I put together a bunch of friends and we are all in the 48hr Game Making Challenge. GameOn/QUT/iCi/Acid and the amazing Truna have put together an impressive event. There will be 17 student teams and 3 pro teams competing over this weekend. I'm in the Monkey Something pro team and all 6 of us have never made a game in under 9 months, Actually I average 2 years to make a game. So 48 hours is going to be a stretch.

There will also be 3 very brave teams from the (Griffith Film School) Games Design, where I lecture. Milk n' Pickles, Sick Fish and Immigration Office will all be part of the first public appearance of the Griffith Games students.

To make things more interesting nearly everyone on the 3 separate pro teams have worked together. So this could be the weekend for long held grudges to surface.

You can read about it here http://www.48hrgamecomp.com/ Over the weekend it will be blogged and streamed live at that address. Or you can rock up to QUT Kelvin Grove and check it out. Any time of the weekend really. We'll all be there.

Those who are about to game salute you.