User:Fako Berkers/marxsbeard

Marx's beard

Dmytri Kleiner is looking for a way how to involve more people with the Thimbl project. I thought about an animation in which the beard of Marx will grow as soon as you set up a Thimbl server or get an account somewhere. This assignment with automated vectors was a good opportunity to sketch how such a program could work and look.

I decided to draw plotted sinus shapes for the hairs. This does not look so good. I'm happy with the decision to let the beard consist of a beardline and beardhairs, but the hairs could be plotted more playfully along the beardline. The size of the beard can be varied by changing a single value. In theory you could attach the number of known Thimbl users to this variable. Of course there should be some sort of central file containing the users of Thimbl, much like a torrent which lists the users that share a file, to assign that variable properly.

You can find the .svg file below. Make sure that you download the PNG along and that the href of the image tag in the .svg corresponds with that PNG file. When you render the output with Inkscape/Seymour, don't forget to put the output layer below the face layer or it looks ridiculous. Because we're using a simplistic vector programming language it is not easy to draw filled squares. This makes that the variable LENGTH that determines the length of the beard can be no longer than 16. Because the code is quite poor LENGTH doesn't except odd values. Apart from these bugs things should be working.

Marx's beard SVG
Marx's beard PNG

There's a lot that could be better, but I'm glad I got an idea about what needs to be done and that in principle it seems possible. A sample output is below.