Portent

Over a year ago, there was a Portent Story on turning photos into 3D at Carnegie Mellon. There is a working website at Stanford University where you can upload a photo (it needs registration) then have it processed into 3D and you can view it using Shockwave.

If you haven’t got Shockwave installed, it will do it for you and once it’s in, you can view your photo or others, zoom in, pan. It’s not bad at all, but it depends upon the original photo and landscapes like the one shown make the best images.

It takes about 5 minutes from uploading until your photo is ready to view. If you’re interested you can download and view the source code in C and C++, but it is a 42 MB file. There’s also a neat integration with Flickr so you can search for photos by tag on Flickr and use those.

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The map shown was generated by Autorealm, a piece of open source software (for Windows). It is currently being rewritten to use a cross platform windowing library called WxWidgets so will eventually run on Mac and Linux.

It’s a credible piece of software, only a few MBs download and installation is very easy. There are a number of examples and it’s very easy to use. So if you’re a fantasy author needing to draw maps or a role playing game designer doing dungeons etc, or even just a game designer this is excellent. It even generates names.

To give you some idea of the power- consider the humble grids- ie the type of paper you would have drawn this on. There are Square grids, Hexagonal grids, Triangular grids, Diamond grids, Polar grids, Rotated Hex grids, Half-Diamond grids or none. The grids can be of any colour or size and are fully scalable and designable with secondary grids. Styles for the grids as well for the secondary grids. Grids can be drawn on top of objects. There is a list of features as long as your arm

The present version is 2.21 – but use the downloads link for 2.00, not 2.1 as that’s broken.

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The image pictured is called a Filigram and was invented by programmer Simon Tatham. He was playing around with code trying to come up something vaguely fractal and came up with this.

There are several examples on the page and if you know which end of a C compiler you pour the code in, you can download the source code and try these out for yourself.
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Don’t recognise the face? That’ Bill Heine, the man who put Headington on the map with his shark through the roof.

MagMyPic is an excellently implemented generator of magazine covers. Just upload a photo, select a magazine- there’s 14 to pick from Vogue, Time, National Geographic and many more and the results are plain to see.

The man pictured is responsible for increased reporting of sharks (not the legal ones!) in the Oxford area. See the previous story!

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Sometimes you need Post-It notes. And if you want to have a little fun, you can easily create them online using this generator.

Then you could be really sad by printing it out on a colour printer, cutting it out and super-gluing it to someone’s computer! Prank #1928 from “the Boys Book of really nasty pranks”. Just imagine the look on their face when they try to remove it! Won’t you be popular!!

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This is well done. A visual generator for characters in the style of the Simpsons, complete with an appropriate backdrop and a message that you add.

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Long before the interwebs existed, historical documents foretold (yeah a Portent!) of Portent Org and today we can reveal a scan of part of one.

No, it’s another generator that lets you create Bayeux Tapestry type illustrations. Implemented in Flash, you select your shapes from the tabbed menu on the left which lets you pick folc, Brave (men), Beasts, King and Misc. Drag them into place, shrinking or expanding them and mirroring them so they go left or right. After that you add text and go onto the next frame. It’s very well done.

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I really like this. Shove in a load of words and it will generate a word cloud- there are loads of parameters, fonts, colour schemes to try.

I used the text from all the previous stories on Portent though you need no more than 150. You can then decide whether to have them horizontal, vertical or a bit of both as well as other parameters and create a picture which you own. Excellent stuff.

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Web 2.0 is the title for the modern type websites (eg Google Maps) that use modern web technology, including advanced JavaScript to update web pages without redrawing the entire page.

Many of these sites have logos that look similar in their style, so it’s not surprising that Web 2.0 Logo generators have started to appear. That said, this is a pretty good one with 5 different looks, such as the Google look that I used.

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In this age of the “War on Terror” where it seems if you’re not part of the answer, you’re part of the problem, it is important to demonstrate levels of alertness. The Fear Chart generator makes this an oh so simple thing to do. Just enter five levels, pick a picture and voila as the French say.

By my reckoning we are at condition Puppy Kisses- ah bless.

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It’s been a while since I covered a generator. This one impressed me because of the range of fonts. The one I used is my favourite though there were a couple of others that came close.

Interesting enough, this is done by a program written in C (with a PHP wrapper) called figlet, using a bunch of special font files and if you’re interested you can download the C source from there with fonts and compile and run it on pretty much any platform.

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