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This is a super weird program that I wrote in processing for a project that performs some grammar analysis tasks on the Taoist classical text Dao De Jing and then churns out 3d models on the other end. It’s fun to just watch the program does its thing, and it also has a bunch of functions that deal with text analysis and model export, so I thought it might be useful for other artists or students too.
This program (1) breaks down the text of the Dao De Jing into word type (using Daniel Howe’s RiTa library); (2) it then breaks down certain word types further into phonemes, and each phoneme is then matched to a 3d shape constructed using Paul Bourke’s supershapes formula; (3) it then exports the “3d form of the text” out as OBJ files, and displays the resultant text and model on the screen. Each of these tasks is written as a seperate function, so with a little reverse engineering theoretically you could take them apart and implement just what’s useful for you. It also stores the results of each of the stages of the grammar analysis as CSV files in the background.
For sound artists: there’s additionally a ‘latent’ MIDI out function that matches MIDI messages to word types / punctuations, which I have commented out in the code, but it might be useful if you want to use text analysis as some sort of timer or ‘score’ for some other musical operations.
I used James Legge’s English translation of the Dao De Jing, but you can replace it with other versions or your own translation by replacing the texts in the DAO.csv file inside of the data folder.
This needs a whole lot of free libraries to run, and it works only with Processing 3.x but not 4.
3d Supershapes Exporter
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I made this small and sloppy processing program for the Reasonable Music project to help me sculpt and export 3d shapes that are based on Paul Bourke’s supershapes formula. A lot of this is just based off Daniel Shiffman’s youtube tutorial, and there are similar web-tools out there already, but this one has a randomiser and also lets you export the shape as an OBJ, which you can then import into blender etc for animation or 3d printing. A lot of the generated models are going to be weird star shapes, but occasionally you will get these really wild asymmetrical forms that would be hard to model by-hand. I think the best approach is just to spam the R key until something crazy turns up. I have included a bunch of fun models in the zipped folder.
It needs a bunch of free libraries to run, and it only works in Processing 4.0+.