Parametric Art Systems

Parametric Art Systems from Denis Kozlov on Vimeo.

The video spans about a decade of work and much more of research. Below I’ve gathered some links providing additional details, examples and explanations.

More videos:
vimeo.com/211742962 - Procedural Aircraft Design Toolkit
vimeo.com/703402772 - Procedural Creature Generator

The key article covering my vision, process and approach. I’ve notably advanced in each since the time of writing, but still find it largely relevant:
the-working-man.org/2018/04/procedural-bestiary-and-next-generation.html

A general overview of the technology involved (at the time of writing my primary 3D tool being Houdini). No prior knowledge required:
the-working-man.org/2017/04/procedural-content-creation-faq-project.html

The initial 2015 essay noticed by ACM SIGGRAPH:
the-working-man.org/2015/04/on-wings-tails-and-procedural-modeling.html

While the above links mostly focus on 3D part of the work, below is my secret weapon often and easily overlooked: batch image processing (typically with compositing tools like Nuke or Fusion)

The basic principles:
the-working-man.org/2014/11/pixel-is-not-color-square.html

And examples of more advanced techniques:
the-working-man.org/2015/08/render-elements-normals.html
the-working-man.org/2015/11/render-elements-uvs.html

Hope you enjoy!

dERIVATIVE – The Making of the Film

Made of shapes, colours and a bit of story, dERIVATIVE is a short film I’ve directed for a wonderful Mixpoint Studio in Prague. It follows through a row of visual transformations and is likely to be more a work of motion design than classical CG animation. The project was a months-long effort and this time I had a chance to personally craft every single pixel of the final film – what has really helped me is a compositing-centered workflow which I’d like to talk about in this tutorial. 

Procedural Bestiary and the Next Generation of CG Software

In the previous essay “Procedural content creation F.A.Q.” I’ve claimed that it would take few months to assemble a full-scale creature generator. So I took those months and did it – introducing Kozinarium v1.0 v1.5:

Procedural Creature Generator from Denis Kozlov on Vimeo.

Procedural systems I’ve been developing during the recent years served different purposes, not the least one being exploration of how far one can go in formalizing the visual art, expressing its language in machine-readable terms. “Quite far” is the answer I’ve got, and today I’d like to share my vision of the next generation of artistic tools which could empower anyone to render their imaginations with almost the ease of thought. But first, let’s take a look at how these procedural systems are made.

Procedural Content Creation F.A.Q. - Project Aero, Houdini and Beyond

I’ve finally found the time to put together a long-requested video demo for Project Aero and would like to use this opportunity and answer some of the questions I’m often hearing in its regard.

Procedural Aircraft Design Demo from Denis Kozlov on Vimeo.

What is Project Aero?

Project Aero is the software I’ve developed for rapid design of aircraft concepts. The video above demonstrates its main features.

 What does “procedural” mean?

In a wider sense it means “automated” - created algorithmically by a computer (rather than manually by a human operator or sampled like a scan or a photograph). Here are the good places to learn more:

On Wings, Tails and Procedural Modeling

Project Aero: Procedural Aircraft Design Toolkit for SideFX Houdini

I find Houdini a very powerful tool for 3D modeling. In fact, this aspect was largely motivational for me to choose it as a primary 3D application. And talking procedural modeling I mean not just fractal mountains, instanced cities and Voronoi-fractured debris (which all can be made look quite fascinating actually), but efficient creation of 3D assets in general. Any assets.

Evaluating a Particle System: checklist

Below is my original manuscript of what was first published as a 2-piece article in issues 183 and 184 of a 3D World magazine. Worse English and a bit more pictures are included. Plus a good deal of techniques and approaches squeezed between the lines.

Part 1

Most of the 3D and compositing packages offer some sort of a particle systems toolset. They usually come with a nice set of examples and demos showing all the stunning things you can do within the product. However, the way to really judge its capabilities is often not by the things the software can do, but rather by the things it can not. And since the practice shows it might be not so easy to think of all the things one might be missing in a real production at a time, I have put together this checklist.

Flexible enough software allows for quite complex effects 

like this spiral galaxy, created with particles alone.

Project Tundra

01. Tundra

Since I find it very cool to call everything a project, here goes “Project Tundra” with some anagrams. Pretty much all visual elements (except for a couple of bump textures) are completely synthetic and generated procedurally with Houdini and Fusion. So almost no reality was sampled during the production of the series. Some clouds from these setups were used. 

Procedural Clouds

I've been playing around with generating procedural clouds lately, and this time before turning to the heavy artillery of full scale 3D volumetrics, spent some time with good old fractal noises in the good old Fusion.

CTU's Faculty of Mechanical Engineering video

Double no: No, I didn't forget about the next part of a typography article and No, I didn't lie claiming it will take a while... And while a while continues, here is a piece of recent work I accomplished with the guys at DPOST Prague.



Czech Technical University 150th Anniversary from DPOST Prague on Vimeo.

Aside from wearing both Director's and Art-Director's hats, I've spent quite some time with hands on material here, taking the 3D work into Houdini to design the cubes effects, animate and render.

Animusic - Part 2

After sharing few introductory words in Part 1 at www.rock-is-dead.info - here are the wireframes we all love so much.



It was incredible ten years ago, it is incredible now. Procedural animation - the concept that keeps fascinating my bent mind, and the concept that wouldn't be possible in any previous era. The idea that instead of telling a computer what to draw, you rather teach it how to draw things changes the whole landscape to me.

The Animusic project was started by two artists Wayne Lytle and Dave Crognale. Their proprietary software uses MIDI input to drive the animation in a commercial programs like 3DSMax or XSI, producing the result of often mind-bending complexity. They get into more details at their website. I would also recommend watching behind the scenes stuff at their YouTube channel.

Enjoy.