Intro
It's been a while since I've last posted and a lot has happened in that time: I've managed to finish my procedural R'n'D and spent several years applying the results commercially. I've also principally advanced in my research on formal taxonomy of visual style and have indulged into the realtime and interactive graphics.
More and more of the commercial work got hidden under NDAs and my own pet projects have become ever bigger, while the time to write about them ever scarcer. But finally, here come some news as I have advanced in one of those big projects - visualizing the game of chess in brand new ways, hopefully the spectacular ones.
The Vision
While infinitely full of inner beauty, the game of chess is traditionally being visualized in a very dry fashion, merely representing the schematics of the board and the pieces, being interesting mostly to the insiders and looking much less exciting to the uninitiated.
I'd like to change that and turn chess into a spectacular show it deserves to be - vivid, dynamic and rich. To explain the game visually, removing the language barrier between the pros and the public and making it easily enjoyable by the widest range of spectators.
As ambitious as the goal sounds, this project is a natural application of my previous work in parametric art systems. I've been developing it in the background since early 2010's and am really happy now that the time has finally come to give it the main stage.
The video I'm presenting today is the first public demo of this work. In its current format it is both an art project where I'm painting the portraits of the individual games of chess, and a research lab where I'm testing out new ideas, approaches and their expressive capabilities.
Each such portrait is meant to be a short and visually rich video artwork representing the dynamics of what's happening on the board in broad strokes - not necessarily detailed, but rather dramatic and emotional, yet conveying the general sense of the game even to a non-specialist. I aim to explain as much as possible and in as visually striking manner as possible - to extract the complexity and the beauty from the game board.
What I'm gradually exploring and building up to is the new visual language of chess including the radically new formats for displaying the game.
I feel this work has advanced far enough to start sharing it publicly, gathering feedback and hopefully building a community of co-minded people.
The Technology
As usual, the project runs on completely custom procedural technology built ground-up from basic math and primary CG tools. Houdini is still my favourite development environment, allowing me to whisper directly to the machine in the visual language I'm most fluent in. I've built the core functionality in vanilla H15 and have moved to H19 at some point for the sake of TOPs optimizations.
The system has a hierarchical modular structure including a bespoke visual game analysis engine, its own custom animation sub-system and extremely flexible visualization modules designed to accomodate both the planned and yet unplanned extensions, variations and experiments. A separate module creates a board and game pieces unique for each game, which might deserve a dedicated post of its own at some point.
It currently consists of over 3400 nodes and builds up on over a decade of my previous procedural expertise. Together these nodes and modules form a platform for visual game analysis - my main research tool and a testbed for further development.
It is also not vibe-coded. Not because I'm against AI (I am not), but rather because I know how to make it without AI. Know how to design and implement a brand new animation system, how to break down complexity into modules and which ones to prioritize, how to make them talk to each other, how to come up with novel ways of presenting the same data and how to enjoy the hell out of this process. And of course I've started it long before AI was even an option.
I may or may not use AI on this project in the future, but so far I also find it satisfying to feel the ownership of each pixel and to understand the meaning behind each down to the basic math functions. To keep it a touch more humane just like the chess itself, where computers have long proved superior over humans, yet people keep playing the game possibly more than ever.
The Future
Regardless of the tools used, this project is about a single goal - to make chess spectacular.
The current work is only the beginning of the journey revealing just a single possible path. There are many more directions to develop with very specific formats I have in mind that are too early to talk about publicly.
I hope to keep posting the new portraits of more games, but what I would really love to do is start building a community of co-minded people. So if you like what you see or simply care, would like to help or just say Hi - please feel free to reach out - let's connect!
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