Fractured Axel

Hi,

If you access the following link:
http://www.dtic.upf.edu/~npares/tmp/KiteColorizer/index.html
you will see the new colouriser I have developed.

It has the following characteristics:
1. It uses materials which are actual pictures of Icarex material. The pictures could be better, I haven't had time to get some really nice ones. All help will be appreciated.
2. It does not mark the edges between the layout panels unless you want to. As default is shows them as light lines that mark the seams. But you can either hide them altogether or make them solid black in case you like pin striping... 
3. It provides different backgrounds to check how the kite looks against them. The kite has a slight translucency that integrates it to the background.
4. It is really easy to adapt it to any kite model/plan. You just need to create an image as follows:
a. 600x300pixels
b. have the kite panel layout where frame is black, background is white.
c. the panel layout must have each panel fully filled with a different shade of grey (hence you can have up to 254 different panels)
d. there should be NO division lines between the panels
e. the image should be called kiteTemplate.png
the image should look something like this:


If anyone likes it, I am making it available for free under Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike (CC BY-NC-SA).
Any suggestions will be very welcome, although I have spent four days on it and now I will not have much time for it for a few weeks.

If we all collaborate to have nice scans/pictures of the different materials available for kite sails I'm sure this will look even better.

So there it is for all the community.
Enjoy    (if you like it)

Great!

Wow. I have wanted something like this for a long time to help with my builds. Thanks for answering my prayers!

Well done.

As a suggestion is it possible to have an undo button (multiple undo really)?

I like this alot. Well done

Hi!
Thanks to all.

Yes, I could try to incorporate an Undo with a few levels, although I don't think it is that bad doing it manually
I think first I will incorporate an Reset button which may come in handy.
Now as I said I will not have time to enter these changes until probably after Christmas.

What I would appreciate is people sending in pictures of Icarex and/or Chikara to make the final image much much better.
The pictures must be of highest resolution and capture the largest piece of material that you can and covering the whole picture.

All help will be geratly appreciated... by all of us who will use the tool!


Cheers,

N.

Hi,

There is a new version of the colouriser:
http://www.dtic.upf.edu/~npares/tmp/KiteColorizer/index.html

1. Many more materials thanks to the collaboration of HiFly from "the other site" and includding my addition of mylar.
2. Reset button

Enjoy!

Very nice work

any chance for higher resolution????

pink wrote:

any chance for higher resolution????

To change that in the code is trivial. I can go any resolution you like.
The problem is you would then need to change the resolution of all the images: kite template, backgrounds and materials.
This is hard work and lots of hours because I am trying to get good samples of the materials and scale them to the correct scale so they look properly on the kite.
But if you wish to help in generating the higher resolution images many people will thank you!

I chose a similar resolution to all other colourisers.
Cheers.

is this open source, can i have code???
i never played with java but i have small background in web/graphic design, and my kids like your colorizer they play with it more than myself .

i might have look and learn something new.

Ara Ararauna wrote:

The problem is you would then need to change the resolution of all the images: kite template, backgrounds and materials.
This is hard work and lots of hours because I am trying to get good samples of the materials and scale them to the correct scale so they look properly on the kite.

That is always going to be the problem with bitmap based colourisers and why I chose to make my ones using Flash and vector shapes. I'm not sure that I'd do them in Flash any more if I was starting from scratch, but I'd definitely be checking out whether an SVG based solution was possible.

And @pink - Ara's colourisers use JavaScript, not Java - not the same thing at all.

yes, yes .js of course, as i said im not familiar with .js maybe is time to change it.

i got already few kite templates done in .svg they might be useful.

pink wrote:

yes, yes .js of course, as i said im not familiar with .js maybe is time to change it.

i got already few kite templates done in .svg they might be useful.

Hi,

Actually my colouriser is programmed in Processing which is then interpreted in JavaScript for deploying it in a web platform.
But it can be used as a standalone application if I export it to be played in a Java machine
So all possibilities available!

My code is available, as I say in my first e-mail, under Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike (CC BY-NC-SA): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons_license

So you can play around with it if you wish to learn Processing: http://processing.org/

Concerning why I took the bitmap approach was precisely because the vectorial colourisers were giving me visual results that were really far off the final version.
I was going crazy in choosing the colours of my kites with those colourisers.
When I thought I had a good combination and I saw the actual materials I had to go back to the drawing board.

So I decided to use bitmaps of the materials, photographs for backgrounds, apply a bit of translucency to the kite to blend with the background, etc.
Also I wanted to avoid having the hard black lines between panels and simulate the subtle division lines generated by the seams.
I know I'll never reach a photographic result and pictures of materials can still provide a false feedback, but at least I find it a bit closer to the final result.

So, both approaches have advantages or disadvantages.
I'm not trying to say mine is better.
It is only better adjusted for my needs/taste and therefore I made it available to everyone.
Cheers.

Hi,

I have enhanced the colouriser with the possibility of having a 3D-like effect to have a feel for volume.
Cheers.