Computational artisan and Peacock incubator Mario Klingemann has posted this beautiful set on Flickr, showing off some example works of art he created in Peacock, Aviary's pattern generator. These are obviously tremendous steps up from some of my own previously posted examples.
You can really get a sense for just how powerful Peacock really is from his examples.
Here's one of my own as well:
Anyone remember those Trapper Keeper notebooks from the 1980's that this draws inspiration from? I'm getting old.
Every day as we work we discuss business concepts in general: what's going on in the industry, what kind of practices we have evolved and what insights we have learned from other people.
We've been wanting to share our thoughts as a team for a while and decided that rather than keep everything on our own personal blogs, we'd share them directly on Aviary.
We're mostly visual thinkers here, (in case you couldn't tell by all the imagery on our website), so when time permits, we'll include some visuals to accompany our thinking as well.
Our RSS feed will be split up into two - business ideas and products. The product blog will keep it's URL:
http://a.viary.com/blog
Our new business ideas blog will be located at:
http://a.viary.com/bizblog
You can access the RSS feed for both blogs on the right hand side of the column.
We hope you enjoy the read!
Here's a quick glimpse at one of the cooler user interface experiments going on at Aviary. Peacock, the Flex based pattern generator, is a tool that is already a great deal of fun to play with. With our new node-based UI, it's about to get even more fun!
The concept is very simple: Pattern objects follow a path to eventual generation on the canvas. Depending on the different points along the path, the generated patterns can be filtered, blended with other patterns and masked.
Using it is easy. You can drop as many nodes onto the canvas as you like. 
Then it's simply a matter of drawing a line between the node connectors to link them, ultimately linking the Canvas node. From there Peacock can automatically work it's magic!
You can add new filter nodes to the path quite easily, which changes the outcome of the final project.
Nodes can be easily repositioned by dragging with your mouse. The linked paths will automatically curve to help maintain their visibility when you move the nodes.
Pattern paths can be infinitely complex, depending on how many nodes you want to add. In case you need more room for a very complex graph, you have the ability to zoom out and pan around your path. These paths can be saved so that you can resume your work on them at a later date.
You can see an example of a semi-complex pattern path below. 
Editing the individual nodes is easy: Just select the particular node you want to make changes to and change its settings in the properties panel. It's really incredible to watch the pattern change immediately as you tweak the settings.
I really can't wait for this particular tool to be released! To try it out, sign up for an Early Bird Invitation on our home page and choose Pattern Generation from the drop down list.
Happy Thanksgiving from everyone at Aviary!
One of the concepts we attempted to address in creating Aviary was that of presentation. We are letting users edit, mix and match a whole bunch of art forms together. How do you unify their presentation in a fun way?
We loved the concept of "art gallery showings" because they unify ways of presenting different mediums. Art galleries can contain sculptures, paintings and tapestries, with music playing as you walk around. You can walk through them with friends, exchanging commentary on the pieces of art you see as you move through it. As great as providing users with a way of displaying their art in a physical gallery might be, it's entirely unrealistic given the scattered geographical userbase that makes up online communities.
So how to do you give this* experience to the internet community?
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What about a completely customizable Adobe Flash-based 3D virtual gallery that you can embed on your website and share with your friends? We loved the idea and decided to make it a small feature of the Aviary website.
Nest is a surprisingly simple structure. It starts as just a room with 4 walls. You can define the walls, ceiling and floor to contain specific textures (i.e. generated in Peacock). 
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You can layout your photos, paintings and tapestries on the walls, exactly where you want them to be located. You can even define some specific elements, such as the size and rotation of the painting!
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3D objects can of course be imported. In this example room we chose to include 3D models of furniture. These also act as "obstacles" in the floor. So you can actually bump into them and your avatar knows to walk around them to get to their destination.
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Watch a video of a character navigating it's way around furniture.
Because an important part of the art gallery experience is being able to walk through one with your friends, we built int the ability to allow multiple people to walk through the same gallery simultaneously and to chat with each other.
Further to that concept, we also built a central hub that connects all rooms to hallways, and all hallways to an elevator. You can visit your friends rooms (and other rooms) in this virtual building that grows as new people create their own floors!
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The coolest feature is that this will be embeddable, so you can take your virtual showcase with you to your own sites and blogs!
To sign up for an early beta account, please use the early bird invitations link on the right (any choice is fine).
* Thanks to Flickr / CheGuevara-Paul for the image!
UPDATE As an unrelated bonus, here's a great image created completely within our image editor Phoenix by Brent.
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Click the image for a larger version.
This is another sample of the artwork from our upcoming ad campaign, by Meowza. This is for Toucan, our color swatch generator. We are basing this particular piece on Roy Lichtenstein's famous modern art style, seen here in Hopeless. We're also tweaking those famous Fruit Loops commercials in the process.
Lichtenstein was famous for borrowing pop culture and comic books (bad) art styles and making it into something good, primarily through blowing it up.
Before deciding to go with Lichtenstein for Toucan's campaign, we experimented with an impressionism style, specifically that of Claude Monet.
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Click the image for a larger version.
You can see the pointed brush strokes that mark Monet's style in this closeup:
Unfortunately, we realized that while this work was stunning and will look great on canvas it didn't really work as well as part of an advertisement.
Both Toucan art pieces will be available for sale in our market as a poster, with ad copy and without.
P.S. I did promise that the next post would be a full Phoenix feature list and we have been working on that (you'll see why the post has been taking so long in the next couple of days), but I didn't want to wait too long between updates, especially as we have a lot more news to share this week.
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Click the image for a larger version.
This is just a quick follow up post to share more of the artwork for Aviary's upcoming advertising campaign, in this case for Hummingbird, our upcoming Flash-Player based 3D modeller. We are basing this particular piece on M.C. Escher's famous work, Relativity.
This will be available for sale in our market as a poster, with ad copy and without.
And as usual, Meowza knocks it out of the park.
Next up: A large analysis of the features in Phoenix, Aviary's Flash-based image editor.
Yesterday we changed how our blog URLs are formatted. We changed them from numbers to sentences so search engines could read and index their content better.
For example:
http://creationonthefly.com/blog/24 became http://a.viary.com/blog/posts/get_bezier
Some RSS feed aggregators like MXNA seem to have interpreted the changes as if we had made entirely new posts and reindexed us. I also saw that happen to our Feedburner RSS feed subscribers.
We apologize for any annoyance this may have caused.
I wanted to showcase some of our talented Artist in Residence's work for our upcoming marketing campaign. This is the artwork and some rough text layout for the part of the campaign for Raven, our vector editor.
This particular ad is inspired by and parodies Marcos Chin's stunning work for Lava Life.
Our artist is Brent Koby, otherwise known affectionately to Worth1000 users as Meowza.
We are creating an ad for almost every tool on our list.
All Brent's artwork created for the campaign will be purchasable on mounted posters through our market once we launch (with or without ad text). We created everything to be stand-alone beautiful on their own.
Another example of an ad was already displayed on our blog (the artwork will also be used in our upcoming book).
PS. I've been told by some people they want this blog to focus on the tool development alone, but I have to disagree. Our marketing is just as important as the tools they help promote. It doesn't matter how great our tools work - without an attractive message drawing people in, nobody will ever want to try them in the first place. If you agree and would like to see more artwork for our upcoming campaigns, let me know in the comments below.
Update! Even our error messages were done by Brent. For instance, here is a nice easter egg for those of you who encounter any errors on our site.
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Click here to play with the interactive 3D model.
Here you can see a real reflective material effect placed on our Hummingbird logo.
You can see just how much improved this new gold material effect is over the last time we updated on this topic:
Material effects like these are only possible because Hummingbird, our Flash-based 3D modeller, utilizes the powerful open source Away3D flash engine.
Why did we choose Away3D to power Hummingbird when there were other very competent 3D engines like Papervision3D and Sandy available?
Simple: Technical realism is a must. Hummingbird will be used to render realistic 3d photo objects for use in other Aviary tools (like Phoenix). Away3D supports features like corrective z-sorting, ensuring us that pictures will be rendered correctly, with polygons appearing exactly as they should. Add incredible real-time material effects previously unseen in Flash and it was perfect for our needs.
Update! More interactive demos:
- Reflective directional lighting
- smooth shading
- transparent reflections
A quick wrap-up on the last few days of excitement here:
Book deal!
We're thrilled to announce that we have signed a deal to create a book of image editing tutorials with a focus on using Aviary's Phoenix, the image editing tool of our suite.
The best part about this book is that we're including a free full version of Phoenix on AIR with every copy, along with source files for every tutorial inside. 
The book will also be useful to users of the GIMP and Adobe Photoshop, as the naming conventions, techniques and tools described in the book are universal in nature to tools used in those programs.
The book will be crowd-sourced, meaning it will be written by our talented community of image editors at Worth1000.com.
The book will be sold in major retail outlets like Barnes and Noble, Borders and of course can be ordered online through Amazon.com and BN.com. More details and a link to preorder will be posted soon.
New logo
We've made a slight change to our branding. We have a new logo, though we may be tweaking it further before our official launch.
New domain
For all you lazy folk out there, you can now access Aviary at a.viary.com:
http://a.viary.com/.
Of course you can continue accessing us at CreationOnTheFly.com.