Me morphing into my brother Sam.

Just a quick post to show what can be made in around 10 minutes with a nifty little java morphing application called Javamorph and of course my favourite image editor gimp.

The Javamorph project can be found at Google Code or if you’re lucky enough to use Ubuntu it’s in your repositories so you can just apt-get it. I think it’s in the Debian Squeeze repos too.

The project homepage is worth checking out for a brief overview of how the program works and a link to a very informative pdf that explains all.

My very quick and dirty example shows me turning into my youngest brother and back again. Sorry Sam.

As you can hopefully see from the image below all you basically need to do is match up the mesh points with certain areas of each face, eyes, hair, nose etc.  Once you’ve done this javamorph will do the rest of the work.

What javamorph creates is a series of images (jpegs) stored in the output folder after you have run a ‘morph’. These images show the progression from one state to another. To make that into a single animation file (in this case an animated gif) you need Gimp and importantly it’s extra package/plugin gimp-gap. So if you’ve not got these the quickest remedy is:

sudo apt-get install gimp gimp-gap

While you’re adding this great program you might also want to take the time to install gimp-data-extras to add some more brushes, palettes and gradients to your collection. You never can have enough.

So, once you’ve made your morph fire up gimp and head straight to the file menu where there is a handy entry titled Open as layers. With this you can import all your individual images as layers on the image in one command – just highlight all your images with your mouse or ctrl + a.

As you can see we now have as many layers as we do images. Why you might ask? Well because this is how the gimp animation package works – each layer is effectively a a frame in our animation. Obviously at this point you could tinker with the images to your hearts content, perhaps changing the colours or adding in some funky fades and gradients to spice things up a bit. This is just a quick and dirty tutorial though so I’ll leave the creativity to you!

So.. back to the gimp. My morph was made up of 20 images so I have that many layers. However, this animated gif will be used on a loop. That means that (if left as it is now) I’d get a nice fade to one face then suddenly straight back to the original. I don’t like that so I import the same pictures again (still using open as layers) and rearrange their order in the layers list so that one fades seamlessly to the other. Not sure that there is a quick way to do this so be prepared to be clicking the move up and move down buttons a good few times.

When you’re happy with it – you’re ready to save. Before making the gif it’s not a bad idea to save it as an xcf first. The last thing you want to have to do is arrange all those layers again! So once you’ve done that click Save as this time and change the .xcf to .gif. Once you’ve done this the export wizard will fire up. Initially it will suggest flattening the image but you don’t want that so select Save as Animation. The next popup allows you to tweak the speed between frames. The best bet really is to leave it at the default 100 initially, see what the saved gif looks like. From that you’ve a far better idea of whether to speed it up or slow it down.

Well done – you just made your first javamorph!

This was all accomplished in Ubuntu Lucid Alpha4 (technically now that’s 10.04 RC .) To achieve the same in Windows you’d need gimp-win.

Inspired (if that’s really the right word) by all this new Ubuntu artwork I decided to have a little go at creating a new wallpaper. As I said in my last post I like brown, it’s smooth, sexy and natural. So, after a little tinkering with an old photo of my Bonsai tree – ‘Gemmell’ – I created this.

It’s now the default wallpaper on my desktop: could it be yours?

If anyone does like it I’ll upload the (somewhat mammoth sized) gimp xcf file so anyone can play with the colours or whatever they wish.

I think I’ve succeeded with this background! Once I’ve finished making all the files I will put these up for download in a variety of different resolutions to suit all desktops.

I made them using the GNU Image Manipulation Program, making specific use of the motion blur filter and the erasing colours to transparency with a gradient.

And a purple one for you mesanna – hope it’s the right purple!

Edit: these files can now be found in the artwork section here.

After a little discussion and some information about how wordpress.com functions from mesanna I’ve quite quickly made the first demo version of a generated button. And here it is.

So far it’s really just proof of concept, and its code is a little limited but could very easily and quickly be improved, depending on what information you actually wanted to share. The reason I’ve put the date in for now is because it’s the simplest way to show the principle involved here. The date comes from the php function of the same name in this case I used:

date("D jS M - G:i");

What I’m trying to show here is that information available on the server side: databases, xml feeds, _POST and _GET requests, anything; can quite easily be transposed into a graphic without the need for java or anything that is blocked on wordpress.com. The sky is the limit!

The image src (if you look at the code) is actually:

<img src="http://bendavis.me/mintpromo/button.php" alt="Linux Mint Button" width="181" height="60" ⁄>

If you visit ../button.php you will see the png. For now I’ve also added basic functionality to change the statement (the “Taste Mint” bit) to whatever you want. Just bear in mind the picture’s only 181px across and the logo takes up 50px or so of that.

So, if you add “?alt=Your Text” to the end of the above link, the button will change accordingly. Note just for clarity the entire url will then look like:

http://bendavis.me/mintpromo/button.php?alt=Your Text

So, if you were type something like this into your browser:

http://bendavis.me/mintpromo/button.php?alt=Minty%20Linux

You’d get a modified graphic just so.

Obviously, no programmer worth his salt would allow the user so much scope for editing your scripts in a working public version of this, it’s just to illustrate my point.

To further polish this, I’d use my .htaccess file to make an actual img url, something like promo-button.png so it appeared to the casual user that it really was just an image. The next step I think.

Thanks to facade47 on the forums for the font and reverend_nerd for his great button.

What do you think?

I thought I’d show off a little and give you a screenie.

Work in progress... but coming along nicely.

It’s not anywhere near finished yet, alot of typography and “the basics” need to be put in, but I think it’s coming along quite nicely. What do you think?

Well, strictly tonight, technically this morning…

Anyway. I quite accidentally found this Twitter style tutorial and decided I wanted a twitter icon of my own, that would go with the colours of my new design. However, I don’t use Adobe Illustrator… or whatever. Just Open Source programs.

Tweeting the way I like it

So out came Inkscape, off ran an hour or two of my time and I produced this.

After a relatively (for me) short period of time tinkering with it, I decided I didn’t really like the way the eyes and cheeks were done in the original article so went back to my more cartoon-like style (seen in my previous doodles.. keep your eyes peeled for when my portfolio goes online).

Actually, I’m pretty pleased with it. I could’ve spent much longer tidying it up, and I probably will go back to it and do just that, but I’ll write up a tutorial to go with when I do.

For now, it’s just gone half three in the morning… and I should really sleep.

EDIT –>

Just thought I’d put the source file up for download as well, I bang on enough to my friends about Open Source, what kind of en example am I setting if I don’t follow my own advice!

My Tweeting Birdy – SVG :: Download source

Click to download full size.

Just a little example of what can be easily achieved using only free software – not bad for an hour or so’s work!

Click it to download the full size image if you like, it makes quite a nice desktop wallpaper. It’s in png format… not sure if you can use png’s in windows but most other OS should be fine. I know Linux is, but I’m biast!