Painting with B[i]rds

Birds of a Feather Flock Together!

Ashutosh Lohana
MDes Ecologies 2024
Bryce Crawford
MDes Ecologies 2024
Inkoo Kang
MDes Ecologies 2023
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1 Strokes generated from bird flight trajectories.

This project was inspired by fluttering birds in the sky that create their own strokes through their trajectories. Thus, the captured movements were represented as two birds in flight, leaving their trajectory vectors in different thicknesses according to the speed of their movements.

The workflow of this project involves recording the fluid motions of two hands using HTC Vive Controllers, trying to represent the recorded motion into various types of shapes, then creating two birds and the animation of their flight, and adjusting more detailed characteristics such as colors, wing beat frequencies, speeds, thicknesses of trajectories, and glossiness using Grasshopper including C# programming and V-ray.

As parametric painters, two birds in different colors start at different points and proceed in different directions. The movements of two birds form a harmonious drawing with only two strokes.

Project video
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2 Painting in progess.
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3 Bird flight trajectories visualized using HTC Vive.
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4 An image of birds fluttering in the sky. Source: iStock
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5 Form Explorations with C# and Grasshopper.