Category: photography

This weekend, I will photograph the Fremont Solstice Parade and the Solstice Cyclists from the 12th year in a row.  These two related but separate events are glorious local tradition of joy, creativity, and public nudity.  In years past, I’d upload all my Solstice photos to a public gallery. Other users could comment on the photos and add them to collections.  Wow, did I see a lot of disgusting, disrespectful comments and photo collections!  Alas, creeps & voyeurs use this glorious event, which should be about freedom & joy & self-expression, to make the nude cyclists uncomfortable.

Privacy for nudists

Thus my quest to make my photos invisible to the general public, but easily accessible to people I photograph in passing.  One year, I put all my photos on my own website and only posted the link on the private e-mail list for the Solstice Cyclists.  Someone on that list made a publicly-accessible page of links that included my private link. Apparently I can’t share things in confidence, even on that private e-mail list.  Another year I put all my photos on my own website, but this time the only place the address appeared was on contact cards that I gave out at the event.  My website’s logs indicated a lot of traffic to certain images, so someone probably shared links to them. I could guarantee that no one could publicize someone else’s photo by delivering all photos via e-mail, but many Solstice Cyclists prefer to remain anonymous and don’t want to give out their e-mail addresses to photographers they’ve just met.

So how can I deliver photos only to the people in the photos without getting contact information from those people? My solution this year is to pass out unique contact cards to each person I photograph. Each card will have a different URL printed on it.  When I hand out a card, I’ll take a picture of the card and its recipient.  When I process photos later, this will tell me which photos to upload to which URL.  The URLs are generated from a large list of English words, so they will be easy to remember and type. The word list is large enough that it won’t be easy to guess someone else’s word from looking at your own.  The words aren’t all colors, or names of birds, or adjectives.  If people lose their cards, they won’t be able to find their photos, but previous solutions had the same problem. Nude people rarely have pockets, but people in previous years have stuffed cards into socks, bags, helmets,etc.  If they have phones, but no pockets, they can photograph the card & keep a virtual copy.

Generating the cards

I obtained a list of 1000 words from a site for crossword puzzle enthusiasts. I read through the list and removed any words with possible negative connotations, like “bizarre”, “murderer”, “chunk”, and so on.  That left me with about 730 words.

In a word processor, I made a mockup of the contact card, using the longest possible word in the URL to make sure it would fit on one line. Once I had one card, I copied-and-pasted dozens of times to make sure it would fill up one page and wrap to the text properly. I had to adjust spacing and font size a few times, but I ended up with a card that would print 16 to a page.

I wrote a python script that would pick a word from the word list, insert it into the text of the card, and write that to a file.  One loop for 10 pages and another loop for 16 cards per page, and I had a text file with 160 unique URLs. I copy-and-paste that into the word processor with my carefully tuned formatting, and everything lines up. It’s so nice to see rows and rows of identical text, except it’s not quite identical. Every card has a slightly different URL.  Print and cut and I’m ready for the parade!

PROCJAM, 7DFPS

Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5, Day 6]

Play Photo Copy in your browser!

Time was almost up, so I concentrated on getting the game into a playable state.  After breaking the AI photographer the day before, I needed a quick way to make it functional again. I added an invisible box around the extents of each landmark and had the AI photographer point at that.  Alas, no understanding of symmetry, or lining up multiple landmarks in one image, or any other things I was hoping to implement at the start of the project.

I also cleaned up the menus and functionality to start and end the game.  The introduction used to be a separate scene, but I pulled it into the main scene.  Less to keep track of, and it let the player look at the instructions while playing by hitting Escape.  Alas, walking through the exit portal, then canceling the exit UI was causing trouble, and it was faster to cut the portal than to debug it.  RIP Exit Portal. I still believe in diagetic UI.

At this point the player could start the game, enter the world, see photos from the AI photographer, take photos, have them scored, then leave the game.  I exported a copy and uploaded it to itch.io, just so I’d have a working version to fall back on.  I still wanted to add features.

The inspiration for this entire Black Rock City generator was a camp name generator written in Tracery. Since Unity supports JavaScript, I tried just putting the Tracery files in my Unity project, but there were some errors.  Fortunately, Max Kreminski had ported Tracery to C# specifically for use in Unity. (TracerySharp on github) Once I could generate camp names in Unity, I assigned each city block a name.  When the user “looked” at a camp (when a ray from the center of the screen intersected the block’s collider) the name would appear on screen.

This added a lot of character to the city.  Just running from camp to camp, reading the amusing names was fun.  This technique was easily extended to the street signs as well, so the player could actually read the street signs by looking at the them, which really makes the city feel like a real place.

My mind raced.  Photos from the AI photographer could be annotated with hints, like, “Found this cool art piece on Echidna street”, “took this picture while chilling at the Undetectable Capitalism Dome”, “some guy told me this thing is called Normie Zone”  Before I started that sub-project, I wanted to be sure that looking at things still worked when two cameras shared the same viewport.  it seemed to work as expected in the editor, but I built an EXE to be sure.  IT worked differently in the EXE.  I built to WebGL, since most people would play it in the browser on itch.io, and it worked a third way!  I did not have time to debug that and add all those new features, so stopped there.

The first version that I uploaded to itch.io would be the final version.  Rushing and stressing were against the spirit of PROCJAM, so I practiced the  skill of knowing when to leave well enough alone.  After I made peace with ending in a stable state instead of working up to the deadline, 7DFPS extended the deadline! Self-control was required to avoid diving in once more.

Play Photo Copy in your browser!

PROCJAM, 7DFPS

Day 1, Day 2

Now that the game could display photos and the player could move around to recreate them, I wanted something to photograph.  The weird snowy test map with its bright primitive shapes wasn’t doing it for me.  But what landscape could I create that would have cool landmarks and not be too hard to navigate.  Well, remember the toy I made back on day 1 that had no relation to this project?

Burning Man is a geometric city on a flat plain.  It can’t be too hard to generate radial and concentric streets, right?  Man in the middle, temple in the gap where the roads don’t touch. Simple, right?

Yeah, it’s pretty simple.  I’m approximating the concentric roads with straight segments between the radial roads, which mostly works.  After defining the roads, I defined “blocks”, spaces between roads where structures could go.  Most would be basic tents & shelters, but a few would be landmarks.

A mistake in the code that rotates the blocks into place created something that looked like the solar collectors from Blade Runner 2049.  While cool, that’s the wrong sci-fi alternate universe.

The block in the center will eventually be the giant “Man” statue, and the large cylinder will be the “temple”

These temporary assets are already more interesting than the old landscape.  The shape of the city creates pleasing leading lines.  I did increase the height of the player character and the AI photographer to 6 meters so they can see over the camps, but are still shorter than the landmarks.  Maybe they are piloting quadcopters. If so, I’ll have to remove the footstep sounds that came with the FPS controller.

PROCJAM, 7DFPS

Day 1

Today I worked on mostly the non-procedural parts of the game.  Of course the procedural generation is the reason I’m doing the jam, but I have to build a game around it so that other people can actually find and experience what I generate.

Updates to the AI photographer were minor.  Instead of placing the camera completely anywhere on the terrain, I picked a distance from my selected landmark based on that landmark’s size.  Distance and a random angle gave me X & Z coordinates, and I ray-casted downwards to place the AI Photographer on the terrain.  That ensured the player could reach the same position.

Setting up the camera views were trickier.  Unity can send a camera’s output to something called a RenderTexture instead of the screen. I thought I’d make a few of these RenderTextures, get the AI photographer to render photos to them, then display them on the UI.  But I couldn’t figure out how to do that, despite clicking around in the Editor and the documentation for a while.

Instead I decided to have two cameras render to the same screen.  On the left, the player’s view, controllable with standard FPS controls.  On the right, the AI photographer’s view.  There’s a key to hide the AI photographer’s view and fill the screen with the normal FPS view.  There’s a nice transition where the FPS view shrinks and the AI photographer’s view slides in from the edge of the screen.  In photo comparison mode, both viewports are square, regardless of the window the game is running in.  Again, the player needs to be able to recreate the AI photographer’s photos perfectly, so the two views need to be identical.

With the cameras sorted, I was able to play the game!  Even in its simple form, with temporary assets and no scoring system, I found it very satisfying to match up every little thing in the photo.  I’m probably biased, since I really enjoy composing photographs with physical cameras, but it’s a good sign that this game is going to work.

I’m participating in PROCJAM, a low-pressure game jam whose motto is “Make Something That Makes Something.”

What should I generate?  I like photography, and I had an idea for teaching an AI to generate photographs of landmarks in a landscape. The player would walk through the landscape to the location where the photo was taken.  Breath of the Wild and Skyrim both have sidequests where players try to find a location based on a drawing or photograph, and I enjoy them.  I also relish the chance to pass some of my photographic knowledge on to an electronic protege. The player’s goal in my game is to replicate the generated photograph as closely as possible, so I call the game “Photo Copy.”

I had uninstalled the version of Unity I had used last year to create Spaceship Wrecker (play in your browser, blog post), and thought I might as well get the latest version instead of re-installing that one.  So I downloaded Unity 2018.2 and set about trying to mock up some test assets: some terrain with landmarks on it.

I didn’t enjoy sculpting the terrain in the Unity Editor. I wanted vertical walls around the edge to keep the player contained, and thought it would be easier to make them by drawing a heightmap in an image editor.  Alas, Unity only accepts heightmaps in .RAW format, and my image editors didn’t output to .RAW.  I found a tool that could import a normal image (BMP, PNG, or JPG) and output a RAW, so I had to use 3 programs to get my terrain.  GIMP -> L3TD -> Unity.

I needed normal FPS controls for the player to move around on the terrain.  Surely something like that is included, right?  Forum threads indicated it was, but those threads were old.  Previous versions had “Standard Assets” included as part of the installer, but this version didn’t.  I would have to use the Asset Store to download them separately.

Last year I used MonoDevelop as my code editor.  Visual Studio felt like overkill, and it was another account to create, another EULA to accept.  Unity 2018 dropped support for MonoDevelop.  Visual Studio was my only option.

Because of this sequence of frustrations, I uninstalled Unity and looked at some cool photos from Burning Man.  All the art installations and quirky camp themes are fun and inspiring.  I started another Tracery project to generate some wacky camps.  I’ve used Javascript and Tracery a lot, so starting a new project and getting some output was quick and easy!

I considered using Cheap Bots Done Quick, to put the output in a Twitter Bot, but I don’t see many benefits to that format, so I kept it on a local webpage. What a fun distraction that is not at all related to my PROCJAM project.

Feeling much better, I downloaded Unity 2017. Now I had the First Person Controller and could write code in MonoDevelop. Once i had the landmarks in the terrain, I made the first photography algorithm: place the camera in a random location, high above anything it might collide with, and point it at a random landmark.

It is technically a photo!  That was enough excitement for day 1.