[ANN]: Kaleidoscope Gallery (and a corrupted stack)

[Wilhelm Sanke]

I have uploaded a Kaleidoscope Gallery - about 30 images on 5 cards - to

<http://www.sanke.org/Software/KaleidoscopeGallery.zip>.

While putting the examples together using a number of differing 
techniques, the working stack suddenly became totally corrupt the day 
before yesterday, this having been preceded by rather frequent crashes 
described in bug report 7812.

After having been notified that bug # 7812 has now been fixed with Rev 
version 3.5-RC1,  I had used my stack with that new version (and 
alternatively with 3.0-gm3), and soon after having opened the stack with 
both versions the "corruption" occured. There is not even a "backup" 
stack anywhere on my harddisk, one of those preceded by a "tilde" (~), 
to which I was referred to by the Rev error dialog.

I opened the remnants of the corrupt stack with a text editor and saw 
that about 20 scripts had completely disappeared, meaning that about a 
week's work was lost. I am in the course of reconstructing the scripts, 
there are no special problems involved, but it takes some time.

Before the corruption,  apart from the crashes a number of weird things 
had happened, among them

- A simple "flip horizontal" script refused to stop (no repeat loops 
were involved here) and went on forever.

- A number of buttons in a supporting stack - one from which I wanted to 
import some relevant scripts - were being deleted, presumably because 
they were incompatible with the # 7812 problem.-

I will describe the procedures used to create the kaleidoscopic images 
in greater detail later. They will be part of my announced 
"Gradientology" stack. For the time being I mention a few general 
principles here:

- The main principle to create kaleidoscopic images is to apply mirrors, 
especially "diagonal" mirrors, but in conjunction with non-diagonal 
mirrors. There are a number of such mirrors in my "Imagedata Toolkit" 
stack (<http://www.sanke.org/Software/ImageDataToolkitPreview3.zip>)

- Another element involves using snapshots of rotated images and to 
super-impose their imagedata.

- Then modifying the imagedata by changing the colors can be an 
essential element (e.g. "duplicating colors" in my "Imagedata Toolkit" 
stack and elsewhere).

- Skewing, stretching, and resizing are other useful techniques.

A short description of the main steps in one approach:

1. I create an image that contains a number of squares with 
bi-directional gradients (again: see the "Imagedata Toolkit")

2. The image is "skewed" by a chosen factor

3. A "triangle" is chosen from anywhere in the image.

4. This triangle is positioned four times at the top, right, bottom, and 
left side of the image

5. This image created so far is rotated by an angle of 45 and 
superimposed with the original image, thus producing an octagonally 
mirrored kaleidoscope.

6. If you repeat this latter process with an angle of 22.5 you get a 
sixteenfold kaleidoscope.--

Enjoy the examples of the gallery.

IMHO I think that Revolution has a much greater potential to create 
kaleidoscopic images than an number of programs and results I found with 
Google searches on the net.

Best regards,

Wilhelm Sanke
<http://www.sanke.org/MetaMedia>