Editor tools
1-14-2016

Ok, so I more or less finished the art tool mentioned previously. Right now I'm calling it ShallowDream, since it is kind of a simplistic tool for aping what Deep Dream does. The images are fine, but it lacks the flexibility, and potentially the speed of DeepDream. ShallowDream does require human artistic input in selecting the basis elements to use for the transform, and since it uses single-threaded Unity to perform all the graphics work, it realistically won't become any faster over time unless I do a large overhaul. To put it another way, I think its primary window of usefulness is only between now and when the first commercial/user version of DeepDream is released. And going back and doing more Google searches, *now* I find all the articles mentioning how to get DeepDream running on Windows that I somehow missed on my previous search.

running_deep_dream_on_windows_the_easy_way_with
running-deep-dream-on-windows-with-full-cuda-acceleration
running-the-deep-dream


Which then produces results like:
neural-style.html


I'm not going to lie, I'm pretty jelly of those beautiful, beautiful results. Anyway! I'll try to upload some pics/gifs of ShallowDream in a bit. It wasn't a complete waste; it does produce reasonable images, and you can import the "shards" used to make up the image into a Unity project, so that you can then apply more effects to the constituent parts in Unity. E.g. if you have a bunch of gear sprites as your shards, you could set them all to rotating to produce a neat overall effect. And I did learn more Unity (specifically how it is a continuing PITA to work with the file system & non-Resource textures in Unity), and improved the code base in general. For instance, I made progress towards having a base framework that I can easily share between Unity apps so that I'm not losing the functionality I've built up so far. Ok, 2 weeks of Yak shaving are over. Maybe. I kind of want to sell the thing on the Unity App store now, and if I do that it will need some more polishing.

Ok, tomorrow I will generate the rest of the professor images using ShallowDream, and maybe put a pulse effect on them. Should be fun!