Show HN: PolyGen App, turn gradients and photos into pretty low poly patterns

http://www.polygenapp.com

by nbartlomiej • 11 years ago

108 47 11 years ago

polygenapp.com

robinhoodexe• 11 years ago

I like it

btbuildem• 11 years ago

Crop seems constrained to the aspect ratio of the original image - is that a bug or a feature?

nbartlomiej9• 11 years ago

Crop aspect ratio matches the "Size" setting, located one screen earlier; so it's a feature for now. I plan to revisit the crop screen sometime in future and bring more control there. Thanks for your comment!

andrewrice• 11 years ago

Reminds me a bit of "trianglify", a low-poly background generator built on d3.js: https://github.com/qrohlf/trianglify

nbartlomiej9• 11 years ago

I've tried d3.js, but decided to go with iron wallaby's delaunay (https://github.com/ironwallaby/delaunay) implementation for performance reasons. The difference was especially visible when working with photos.

mbrock• 11 years ago

I'm curious about how well this works on videos...

KnightHawk3• 11 years ago

Why did you decide to make this mobile only?

Personally I would use it the most from my computer, considered a port ;)

nbartlomiej9• 11 years ago

I'll be happy to make a desktop version if users want it. Comment here, reply to this tweet (https://twitter.com/polygenapp/status/560846810735206400 ) or let me know in any way if you're interested.

Edit - And as for "why mobile-first", I wanted to make the app casual and approachable. You can take a photo of your teacup and have a cool low poly version of it in an instant. Or generate a pretty colourful wallpaper with one tap. But I'd love to build a desktop version too. Larger screen and finer control over the pointer would give some new possibilities.

Edit 2 - In case somebody didn't notice, you can generate a wallpaper for your desktop from the mobile app. Just choose a desktop option in the "Size" setting.

lumpypua• 11 years ago

My upvote on this comment is my indication that I'm interested in the computer version. :)

welshguy• 11 years ago

Me too :-)

windsurfer• 11 years ago

10 years ago, I would never have guessed that I would be finding a new application on my laptop, sending a link to my phone, installing the app on my phone, generating an image, and then emailing myself an attachment back to my laptop to be used as my desktop background.

sfall• 11 years ago

the app does have built in resolution for macbook retina displays

gravitronic• 11 years ago

my favorite bot in this gene is on twitter:

https://twitter.com/lowpolybot

rev_bird• 11 years ago

Took a look at what it was doing, but recently it seems to mostly be engaged in ongoing conversations with other bots spitting out nonsense images.

WhitneyLand• 11 years ago

It's nice, good work. I wonder if you might be better off without the ads though. Not much revenue, and without them you can possibly build a bigger user base as a reputation point for your resume.

ctdonath3• 11 years ago

$1 may be too much friction at this point. Not something most people consider must-have, but willing to put up with ads to fiddle with.

kristopolous• 11 years ago

I think the suggestion was to give a clean version of the thing away

juliendorra• 11 years ago

The ad made me buy the in-app purchase instantly, even before trying (it's placed nearly in the way of the action button).

So in my case, the ad worked as a immediate trigger to pay.

(I would have bought it a 1€ directly in the store, without any hesitation, too. So it made no difference in the end. I'm just a little annoyed that in the future I might have to restore my purchase).

o0-0o• 11 years ago

Crashes constantly using a google galaxy Nexus. I would love to have it work though.

ThomPete• 11 years ago

I am surprised nothing showed up on the mac app store for "low poly art"

I would pay for such an app.

nbartlomiej9• 11 years ago

I'll be looking into it. Similar topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8967391 .

jawngee• 11 years ago

http://dmesh.thedofl.com

ubercow• 11 years ago

I'm getting a force close when trying to choose a picture on a Sprint Samsung Galaxy Note II. I have no experience with android development and don't know how the force close reports work, but one was sent and I hope you can figure out the bug.

Really looking forward to trying this out! Will be great for wallpapers.

nbartlomiej9• 11 years ago

I'll be looking into it. In the meantime you might experiment with a different camera (pick "System" in the "Camera & Gallery" option). And many thanks for your comment.

AndrewHampton• 11 years ago

It looks very nice, but it's crashing on my LG G3 as soon as it loads. I see a white background and red/pink banner at the top for about 3 seconds, then it auto-closes. I'll keep it around and watch for auto-updates and hope it's fixed.

rebel• 11 years ago

Pretty cool app! If you're interested in adding an option to sell prints, I'd love to help. You can reach me at interest at printdropper.com

k__• 11 years ago

Crashes when choosing a picture on Ascend Mate.

The back-button gets hidden per default and when used he doesn't go back to the main menu but leaves the app.

ctdonath3• 11 years ago

The regenerate button seems to cycle (inconsistently?) thru the grain sizes. Undesirable; if I pick a grain size and regenerate, I'm looking for a suitable arrangement at that size.

Otherwise, nifty!

nbartlomiej9• 11 years ago

The "refresh" button randomises as much as it can, but you can prevent a section from being randomised by "locking" it (clicking on the tiny lock icon).

So you can pick a size, lock it and hit "refresh" as much as you wish. I'm glad that you like the app, cheers!

ctdonath3• 11 years ago

Ah, didn't realize "refresh" was randomizing my prior-chosen settings; thought it should just re-apply those settings to the randomization process.

kaoD• 11 years ago

I can't try the app (stuck on a Gingerbread phone) but it seems fun. I'm eager to try it.

As far as I can tell, the user chooses the location of triangle vertices, right? It would be interesting to try a genetic algorithm there though it probably fits best in a desktop version.

Also, did you experiment with Voronoi diagrams instead of triangulation?

nbartlomiej9• 11 years ago

For abstract patterns, points are chosen "randomly" (grid with randomised offsets). For photo-based ones, I'm using JSFeat's YAPE06 (http://inspirit.github.io/jsfeat/#features2dcorner), plus some own customisations. I'm constantly looking for ways to improve generating photo-based patterns; if anyone has some ideas here, I'd be happy to listen.

I've played with genetic algorithms, but without anything practical. Indeed, this might be more appropriate for desktops.

I've experimented with Voronoi too, but the results weren't as pretty. The cells were more rounded; and the low poly style was gone.

davidrusu2• 11 years ago

looks like it could be interesting but very obnoxious ads

georgechen• 11 years ago

You can support the developer via In-app purchase to get rid of those ads you know.

davidrusu2• 11 years ago

really.. how am I supposed to be a millionaire if I throw money away like that??

cordite• 11 years ago

This reminds me of voronoi diagrams, except the vertices seem to be applied as a best-fit around contrast and hue differences--then the cell being filled with the average color of such.

ihaveajob• 11 years ago

Beautiful. I bet you could get some very nice results if you use a Voronoi diagram using the color gradient as distance function. Even better if you chose points not randomly, but based on the slope of this distance, so they're concentrated in "feature points".

nuclearghost• 11 years ago

Running on iPhone 5 with iOS7 seeing a weird issue where only about the top third of the photo is rendering.

Works fine when rendering with colors.

Anyone else seen something like this?

sauravt• 11 years ago

Oh man I am working on a very similar app, you beat me to it. :)

mcmancini• 11 years ago

Neat app. A cool feature would be the ability to extract colors from a photo (like Adobe Kuler) and use those in the Abstract Colors pattern.

sunspeck• 11 years ago

Haven't tried it out yet, but looks nice.

Surprised to see that this wasn't authored by Mario Klingemann, creator of the very clever LowpolyBot:

http://lowpolybot.tumblr.com/

tenken• 11 years ago

Show HN, version 3.x ..... soooo not "new" ? :)

but it looks nice! downloading now.

avmich• 11 years ago

Is it similar to this approach - http://rogeralsing.com/2008/12/07/genetic-programming-evolut... - ?

nbartlomiej9• 11 years ago

No, it's different. Here I've described how I'm working with photo-based patterns: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8968113 . More technical details on PolyGen's Medium: https://medium.com/@polygenapp .

coryl• 11 years ago

I've been paying an artist $15 per picture to do this for a project :O

normloman• 11 years ago

1996-2004 | Gradients and bevels on everything.

2005-2010 | Concentric vector circles on everything.

2011-Present | Gradients with triangles on everything.

In all seriousness, this is a nice idea, but it seems really limited for just an app. It should be a photoshop filter! (or I'm sure GIMP could use some love)

Show HN: PolyGen App, turn gradients and photos into pretty low poly patterns

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