Melting People

If you've looked around this site a bit already, you might have noticed these psychedelic backgrounds.

A bunch of squiggly lines resembling islands, melted candy, and mutated tree trunks. What you might not have realized is that these puddles used to be PEOPLE.

One day I was messing with blender and found a very strange result of working with images. When an image is applied to an object, its vector must be decided. The vector describes the way the image is applied. Its scale, size, position, and setup. Usually I would let a UV map decide the vector of the image. Then wherever the square was on my UV map, that part of the image would show up on my modeled square. However, this time, I just applied a noise texture into the vector.

The image is stretched along the noise texture. The noise texture is basically a couple massive gradient dots that slowly change the direction and flow of the image.

Changing the scale provided even more insanity.

I tried other textures; other sizes.

And finally I began mixing. Almost every setting has a different effect on the produced image. Size, complexity, relationships, color pallet; they could all be controlled by the user.

Here's a picture of me and my niece. We're in downtown Grand Rapids. There's lots of vibrant colors alongside toned-down hues.

We can make use of some of this existing color pallet through this "melting" process. Blender lives up to its name and totally spreads around the colors in whatever pattern you want, producing a visually striking image.

This is one of my greatest examples of the contradiction of digital work. Some view digital work as a crutch. The program did the hard part. I haven't filled out each of these circles, or carefully picked out the color pallet hex code by hex code. Yet when I fed this into the program, I had thousands of settings to choose from. It was up to me, the designer, to choose the one that suited me. Did the program do the hard part? Or did it do the easy part?

Either way, neither of us could make these cool images on our own. I get to make these images without having to invest all that time. How sweet is that?

Plus its just fun melting people.