Please, How to control the SPACING between particles in Bomber FF 3.0?

This is a good question. Would be cool if someone post a snippet or filter that let's you use a bomber in this way.

Loking at many filters to see if I could find a way to have a control over the spacing between the particles I have not found yet any solution, becuase on all the filters seems to have always a random component, and none of them have a specific control over the spacing between the particles, even not looking at the components involved in the bomber making, at least I did not see it.

It is strange that the Bomber component has the greatest amount of controls and options BUT does not have a control for the spacing between particles

I am beginning to think that this is because all the bomber is based on RANDOM calculations so it would not be possible to add a spacing control if the particles are NOT themselves controlled.

Do tell us what they say.

Until know I have got one answer only, and he think that this is possible, but he only gave a quick answer "You might like the regions node for this, that doesn't overlap."

I will have to see it in the user guide how this works and how can this be used, as I do not know what the region node is.

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Spaceray wrote: I will ask this same question to the Genetica forum and see what they can answer (not about FF)

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CFandM wrote: See the problem is...They might give an answer using genetica not FF....There is no region node in FF....

As said above, I went to the Genetica Forum to ask if this was possible to make inside Genetica and not inside FF. I would not ask genetica problem solving questions in the FF forum. If this can be done in Genetica would be the same as in FF.

BUT perhaps the solution could help probably in some way to "copy" it to FF if there could any similar or equivalent component. If the solution is through "region node" I do not think would be possible in FF.

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Before you put the image or shape into the bomber you can create a way to rotate. shrink and move that image or shape...Then you have a way to do it manually and it shows in the bombers results...Then the bomber is just an advanced multi-blend,,,,,

YES, I thought someting similar to do it before Bomber, but then I do not know how to make that they doesn´t overlap after the blend with bomber (or anything else) none of the letters should be overlaid over the other.

USE SHAPE COLLAGE SOFTWARE

I think that the best way could be to use the Shape Collage software that HAS SPACING and can accept unlimited photos, letter images...

I will try it this way and see what I can do.

Thanks very much for your help

THIS EXAMPLE ABOVE HAS BEEN DONE MANUALLY ???

I agree and think and have seen that the typographic patterns shown in the WORDS Typography artistic Collage thread can be made by hand and would not be so difficult and would perhaps would be possible to make,

BUT HOW would you do the above example MANUALLY BY HAND and position one by one EACH of the letters ? I do not think that this has been done ONLY manually. How could you position, rotate, and make them in such a organized way ? How much time would it take ?

THIS ABOVE EXAMPLE IS A SEAMLESS PATTERN

There something MORE important, misterious and suspicious, HOW can you make MANUALLY and placing each letter by hand to make A SEAMLESS PATTERN ?????

BY the way, THE WORDS pattern in the thread I have put are ALSO SEAMLESS!!!

This is why I believe that there must be some kind of software making for this that can be able to make this SEAMLESS pattern, and this is WHY I though first on Filter Forge

Please look below the example in this post to show that this is a SEAMLESS PATTERN so I doubt much that this is made by hand position each one of the letters

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Morgantao wrote: SpaceRay, even in Shape Collage it's not always possible to get the effect you're after. You may set the spacing, but then you'll have areas with bug "holes" between the images, while in other areas the images will still overlap eachother. By the time you add enough spacing to have no overlap in the "crowded" areas, the areas with less images will have alot of white space around the images.

YES, very well said, and I agree and you are totally right, and although it has the spacing control, the distibution is totally random, and can´t control the overlap, BUT is a little easier with PNG with transparent images because Shape Collage takes the photo as a whole.

Although there is a VERY important thing I have forgot and missed to tell

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Morgantao wrote: The only way to do it then is to get the Pro version, that allows you to manualy drag images from place to place, and get some of the overlapping images in the crowded areas to the less crowded areas. But that could be alot of work, and what you want is something that does it automaticaly.

EXACTLY, this is what I forgot to tell, it would be really very difficult to do it with the normal version, BUT I have bought the PRO version last year when it had the price of 25$ (now have raised to 40$) and so you can get a distribution that
that the least overlapping or have more space than needed between the photos and then arrange them back in the right way inside Photoshop.

Of course that this is NOT the right way I want and as you said it woould still need some work, but at least is a POSSIBLE solution and available until there could be a better alternative.

As you say I wish that it would be any kind of "automatic overlapping detection" so when loading a bunch of images they would be distributed all over the empty space available and fit with a tight spacing and use the space in the best possible way.

I have searched "fill a shape with letters" and "text or letters plugin" and there is none that could works and look like the the first example above, and also any kind of tutorials that could show how to make this, but without sucess yet.

Here's an example of a word cloud that I made using Illustrator. Note that it's a seamles tile.
As you can see in this example, I haven't moved any of the overlapping words yet, it's just the beginning of the process.
It's a semi-automatic process, as it's not totally automated, but it's not entirely manual.
A letter collage should be easier with this method, as it will be easier to manipulate the overlapping letters, than whole words.

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Morgantao Most of the typographical tiles that you can find online are available as VECTOR files too. That suggests that they were made with something like Adobe Illustrator.

Perhaps is true that you have to use a combination of Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop and a word cloud online tool, but do not know if this would be for seamless.

Please look at this video I found ---> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KfltVCwA_s

Thanks very much for all the suggestions and help you have done in the first of the 3 last posts.

From all the words on that post this ones below have the weight in GOLD filled with diamonds, don´t get me wrong, the others are also interesting and helpful, BUT this ones have helped much than any other thing could have helped. How can I thank you enough for having helped me with this words revealing the real name of "Word CLous" and the meaning of this.

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Morgantao You can google search "Word cloud", that will help you find some online tools that can take words and arrange them randomly withought overlap, but they are not seamless. I guess one could use a word cloud generator

With this simple words that you have written, you have untied and solved a whole problem that have been sleeping and buried since 6 years ago !!! And you have opened a huge great door that I thought I will not be able to open in the way you have done.

First before explaining why I have said this, let me tell you that I am NOT searching for a seamless way to make a typographic pattern, I am sorry if you could understand it this way, and could be a confusion, sorry I am not good perhaps explaining it.

When I said above that the examples I have put are seamless patterns did not mean that I wanted to have seamless patterns, I wanted to show with this that they could NOT have been made MANUALLY, I can´t see anyone making this textures manually, so I had the idea that there SHOULD be any kind of software for MAKING this. I was sure that there must be some kind of tool to make this automatically.

AFTER SEARCHING ON GOOGLE "WORD CLOUD"

I could not believe my eyes and thought that this was a dream and that when I would wake up it would not be true. BUT no, is REAL and is TRUE, this two words are the exact definition and perfect name of what I have been searching for 6 years without any sucess !!!

There are not only one tool to make this, there are LOTS of them !!!! And they are very flexible, customizable, wonderful, useful and amazing.

And with this two words there are lots of websites that have reference to this !!!!

AND IS NOT ONLY ABOUT WORDS --- IS ALSO USEFUL FOR SINGLE LETTERS !!!!!!!

I have found that some of the tool for generating and creating work clouds can ALSO make "letter clouds" and would be with careful design and planning very similar to the example I have put in the first post.SO YOU HAVE SOLVED TWO PROBLEMS IN ONE

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Morgantao I'm not saying there's no software out there, somewhere that can do those typographical seamless tiles. I'm just saying I haven't found one yet, and I've been searching for a long time.

I di not say that there was no sotware available either, and the same as you, I also haven´t found one yet, BUT the difference is that I was NOT looking for a seamless typograhic pattern maker, I wanted a normal typographic pattern texture creator that could be customizable and could follow any shape you could put, but I was happy it was just good with a plain square or rectangle.

I have seen examples in many places since 6 YEARS ago and was in love with these kind of typographical art, and always have been asking in forums, to typographic software companies, searching through lots of places all over internet, investigating HOW could be this found and whcih name could this have if there was one.

At the beginning of last year I was already very tired of this and I let it die the idea and decided to spot searching as was not possible in anyway, and nobody could help me find this.

Now 1 year after, recently by chance looking for another totally different thing I found again the example above and the words textures, and this was the ignition to make the flame desire for this to come alive again, and decided to ask it here in the forum.

AND THE SOLUTION TO ALL THIS GREAT AND LONG QUEST IS TWO WORDS "WORD CLOUD"

Thanks a million for having helped to me finding this !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I will put some examples after

SOFTWARE FOR MAKING AND GENERATING AUTOMATICALLY WORD CLOUDS

http://www.tagxedo.com/

http://www.wordle.net/

although there are many more

Later I will show ALSO how the some of the WORD CLOUDS software can ALSO make LETTER CLOUDS, specially the www.tagxedo.com

It has excellent control on spacing and tightness between the letters and even more

I think it's safe to say that while in theory what you just said made a lot of sense, I didn't understand much of it and couldn't possibly start working on it in FF....

I think when 2.0 beta was coming out uberzev made some test filter that allowed for distinct, non-colliding bomber example that pretty much can be used for this. Been a long time experimenting with stuff like this. Uberzev's example dealt with 4 bombers with really insignificant amounts of tint with distinct hue differences per bomber. It was then fed into a long chain of thresholds to separate out objects and what happens is clean, non-colliding particle. It probably will break if you feed in anything else though, meaning you can't put colored bombers, and it's not a simple construction.

And here's the filter itself.

The controls for the required 'safe areas' for different bombers are manual, as I haven't figured out the math for repeat-amount-to-blur, so you can easily make the particles collide by setting the 'safe area' sliders at a lower setting.

TD

Letter Cloud In Progress.ffxml

ThreeDee, wouldn't min/max do just as well as long as input is black and white? This makes me wish for feedback / iterator nodes.

Edit: I meant minimum and maximum in the processing nodes. Not the math nodes.

Sounds like a plan.
Call me when it's finished

The filter. Note that three possible scenarios in x and y offsets are checked, as the particle can overlap with diagonally adjacent particles as well.

Non-overlapping Bomber.ffxml

Guessing there's no practical way doing it without having it hardcoded.

I was about to suggest doing it iteratively, as in have the next bomber use the x y offset coords used in the first bomber to determine where not to put the next set of particles. But that doesn't look like it'll work. Like this whole thing always seems pretty impractical to do in FilterForge to begin with. Like even with a script it seems limited.

What would be REALLY GOOD AND USEFUL is that there could be a NEW updated or different Bomber component that could have already this non-overlapping controls inside the component built-in already by default, and so you could decide to have as now happens overlapping shapes or not.

Would it be so difficult, complex or hard work to include a non-overlapping feature inside the bomber component?

Surely the great experts of the Filter Forge team could find a way to do it, although it depends if Vladimir wants to have it or not.

Unfortunately the problem is significantly more complex than that. My letter cloud attempt from 22 March 2012 utilizes a similar approach to the one you suggest, but even with 6 bombers in succession the fill-in is less than desired.

I don't currently have any method to do this with built-in components. I can only consider a script approach, but even that fails due to memory issues when I want to do many small particles. So, unless we get a built-in Bomber that can do this, it is going to be a rather complex scripting matter as far as I can tell. At the moment it seems that you'd have to try and separate every rendering thread (meaning those separate "boxes" that show up at the beginning of the render cycle) to consume memory. Not a simple task.

Well I'm a little (or a lot) out of my depth here but maybe you could fake it? So you create several prebuilt combinations of small and large letters like my simple sample below. It seems that they don't overlap.

Bomber no touch 2.ffxml

Burt, good try and well done, but regretably I think that this is no solution, as I have seen that all are circular shapes although is true that they do not overlap, there is a lot of space inbetween the shapes and this is because the density is 1, if you raise the density to 2, they will fill the gaps but also will overlap.

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Burt Well then we may have to wait until the Bomber with collision detection arrives.

I agree that perhaps the best would to wait and see if Vladimir or the FF developer team finds a way to make inside bomber a collision detection so you could choose non-overlapping if wanted.

Also think that maybe without this perhaps there is no easy way, or even is not possible without scripting, and perhaps even with scripting can be hard and complex, although really I do not know.

The collision detection should be for regular and irregular shapes, and then join them toghether as tight as possible as you can see from the letters shown here in this letters collage example



This could be the result of a high density bomber result with collision detection

Would be really cool and awesome that the bomber could have collision detection controls, spacing and be able to customize how tight the particles can be and so you could match and make the letters collage above here, OR any other thing that could be used as shapes as for example the FF life saver with transparent background.

And also continuing with examples that would help having collision detection and spacing control for bomber I can have this one here below

Also has been made by hand on photoshop one by one.

It would be incredible, amazing, really great and awesome if there could be possible to have a Shape of Things (by CFandM) filter where the shapes loaded could be distributed and arranged in NON-OVERLAPPING way as shown in the two examples above here.

here is one example with the now available very overlapping version