There was an interesting challenge during GISH 2021.
64 [IMAGE] On Supernatural, they always said, “Don’t pull the thread!” We say pull the thread. Create a portrait of a Supernatural character out of a single thread, in the style of Slovenian artist Cvern. (53 points)
My literal interpretation was to create a portrait just by wrapping a single length of thread around a series of nails placed in a circular pattern. I chose the Castiel character from Supernatural since he is portrayed by actor Misha Collins who created GISH.
The most promising path forward seemed to be converting a photo of Castiel through some sort of software. Online searches did not provide any obvious options. (Other teams shared pre-existing resources after GISH ended, so my search terms must have been flawed.) This led to my decision to try writing my own application providing this functionality.
I spent a few hours each day over the week of GISH writing a C# application. That programming language offers some beneficial features to quickly produce a prototype, and I anticipated a need for many iterations to generate acceptable results.
This is the photo of Misha/Castiel I chose to try reproducing. My application was showing decent looking preview images by the end of GISH. Sadly there was only approximately one hour remaining by the time I reached this point. This was obviously not long enough to try for a physical version, so ultimately I submitted a screenshot of my app with an explanation of those circumstances.
This proved to be a fun problem to try tackling. My plan is to publish my code as open source after making a few improvements. The user interface definitely needs some work. Specifically I need to add error checks for the data fields, and some options are only accessible directly within the code.
An optimization pass would also be a great idea. It currently takes around 20 minutes to finish processing an image. This was somewhat acceptable during my attempts to produce a one-off piece of art. The average person is likely not willing to wait anywhere near that long. Thankfully I already have some thoughts on how to significantly reduce that duration.
I did have enough time while waiting for my app to do its thing to get a good start on a frame for the physical version. My plan is to go ahead with making a full thread portrait once I catch up on some sleep.
