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Show HN: In memory of Bob Ross, a simple painting generator, Gogh (ngokevin.github.com)
90 points by ngokevin on Oct 30, 2012 | hide | past | favorite | 28 comments



Very nice. I was sad to see it stop when it had done the tree.

The Joy of Painting is great (Bob Ross Incorporated, not so much). I don't think I'd ever hang one of those quaint images on a wall. But the quick techniques to achieve a certain effect are fascinating, at least to an ignoramus like me, e.g. pushing down with a certain brush to get tree branches, or swooshing down on previously drawn stuff to create reflections on water.

Incidentally, I've always thought there was something almost algorithmic to it: the motives themselves were really formulaic, and the techniques reminded me of certain Photoshop tools and brush effects. The submission is a fantastic start, but I think you could go much farther than that.


Thanks for the encouragement! I'm still going to keep going, but I wanted to submit it close to Bob Ross's anniversary. I was planning to do mountains next.


It's beautiful.

And it's further a demonstration of how magical Bob Ross was; without his narration, it's just an insipid landscape, if the clouds are not happy and little, and the left cloud does not have the right cloud as a friend.


This is absolutely fantastic!

It would be interesting to expand this to allow user control - a bunch of procedural high level brushes.

The goal would be to get someone who can't draw able to drastically influence the output, but still make the result look good.

Do you mind if I pinch the idea and see what I can come up with in that direction?


Definitely, go for it. That's what GitHub forks are for right? :)


For those interested in tightly-coded procedural graphics, have a look here: http://pouet.net/top10.php?type=procedural+graphics&plat...


Nice - but needs more happy little clouds :)


Or a happy little bird.


Are you guys looking at the same picture as I am? What I see is a weak copy of Bret Victors landscape generator with horrible colours and MSPaint-like strokes.

I mean it's nice to have such a thing on your CV, but why post it to HN? (and why upvote it?)


Could you link to Bret Victor's generator, please?



I'm going to fork this and make a new version in memory of Vincent van Gogh, which I'll call Bobross.


Well played.


You might also appreciate "Automated Landscape Painting in the Style of Bob Ross"

http://www.cgl.uwaterloo.ca/poster/alex_NPAR.pdf

The full paper is behind a membership wall here https://diglib.eg.org but you can read the first page here

https://diglib.eg.org/EG/DL/WS/COMPAESTH/COMPAESTH09/115-122...


This is gorgeous.

Though, if in memory of Bob Ross, why is it named after Gogh?


The brushstrokes are more in Van Gogh's style. (not the author)


Snow-capped mountains :)


Fun, thanks for posting.

If this puts anyone in the mood to receive some Bob Ross affirmations, I really enjoyed PBS's Bob Ross remix made earlier this year: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLO7tCdBVrA


Cute: "on the second day, ngokevin built the sky [ngokevin]"


Happy little trees :)


This is really cool. How apropos that I just last night started reading PG's book "Hackers & Painters"!


Where are you based? If you're in NYC or Berlin, you should present this at Hack And Tell! It's great!


In Oregon. If I was in NYC, I'm not too sure if I would venture out into that weather.


That made my day -- seeing JavaScript draw me a happy little tree.


Beautiful


I may use these generated pictures as backgrounds for slide presentations, so it would be nice to hear if the author is fine with that. What license is the resulting picture subject to?


I am not the creator, but in the spirit of Bob Ross the only natural thing would be to liberate it: "It's your world" :-)


It's under the Bob Ross license. Go for it. These are CPU suckers, so I'd probably turn down the frame rate.




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