a dude

Open the page. One click, another dude.

Every feature is a function. Nothing is a bitmap. Faces are pinned to a rough 3D skull, so yaw, pitch and roll carry the eyes, nose, mouth, hair and hats around with the head instead of sliding them across a flat oval. The outline is the silhouette of that skull — the radial extent of the projected form plus a per-seed lump profile that can dent inward — so heads come out as potatoes rather than eggs.

The ink is a dry nib: a stroke is a filled variable-width ribbon with a wet core and loose filaments down each flank, pressure running one to five swells along its length, pooling where it lands and lifting on the way out. Masses are built from strokes so their ends make the edge. The paper has tooth and mottle, tuned by measurement.

Which pen is a property of the drawing. Most days it is the house dry nib, but sometimes it is a biro — thin, navy, near-constant width, skipping where the ball runs dry and never pooling — or a fineliner laying one dead-even line, or a wet blue-black fountain nib that blots into every join, or something soft and broad and grainy. Colour, weight, pressure wave, skip rate, pooling, filaments and paper bite all come off the pen, so every mark on the page agrees, down to the hair and the name written underneath.

Run it

Open index.html, or:

python3 -m http.server 8765

then visit http://localhost:8765.

Space, click, or tap for another. The seed is in the URL (?s=4929), so every dude is reproducible.

a make him move and m something else are written under the label at the foot of the page, in the same hand as everything else, and pressing the words does what pressing the key does — a phone has no A to press. He starts moving. ?anim=0 holds him still. ?m=walk|wave|jump|look|dance|shrug insists on one; without ?m he does whatever his seed says he does.

He is not a picture being tweened. The head is already a skull with a yaw, a pitch and a roll, and the body is already a stick rig the silhouette is grown around; animating him is a matter of moving that rig and inking him again. Twelve drawings a second, each one drawn from scratch, so the line boils the way a line does when a hand draws it twice and the head turns in space rather than skewing on the page. The sheet — paper, grain, name, the words at the foot of the page — is laid down once and reused, because none of it moves and the grain pass alone costs three times what the whole figure does.

?plate=1 renders a sheet of 48 heads on one page.

?s=4929	that dude, every time
?anim=0	still
?m=walk	walk, wave, jump, look, dance, shrug
?plate=1	a sheet of 48 heads

scripts/shot.sh screenshots seeded dudes; scripts/plate.sh does the same for a sheet; scripts/anim.sh <seed> <motion> grabs the frames of one cycle and scripts/strip.py lays them out as a strip to flip through.

The drawings are after mannay.

WIP

These are not the page. The page is still a dude.

• v2 — walk around him. The skull already turns; this is more yaw. Slider at the top, arrow keys, or ?yaw=90.
• aisle — drop a few of them in the weekly shop. Space for another aisle, d to drop them again, n for how many. Same paper, same pen, not finished.
• plate — a sheet of heads. Click one and they look side to side. Space for another plate.