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This week we hit a milestone: the site now has 100 public generators and growing. Thanks to all who’ve been making generators, and especially clydev who’s the first user to have over 10 published generators. Here’s this week’s round-up; thanks to the anonymous creators and to clydev, udagawa, alebur, and techi18.

Sign City

The Sign City design is another billboard in a panoramic shot of Times Square.

Control Signal

The Control Signal design is a traffic signal under your command.

Old style TV

The Old style TV design by user udagawa is a classic old-school television with cathode-ray tubes and knobs and dials and all the works.

Wall Painting

The Wall Painting design by user clydev is a painting being installed by two gloved men. Handle with care!

Dark Tower

The Dark Tower design is a billboard on a looming tower at night.

34th and Seventh

The 34th and Seventh design by user techi18 is a billboard behind a lamppost at an intersection.

Museum Art

The Museum Art design by user clydev is a painting inside a museum room flanked by imposing statues.

Park Billboard

The Park Billboard design is an imposing billboard beside a leafy park, somewhere oriental.

Happy Fans

The Happy Fans design by user clydev is a bunch of guys cheering at a screen.

Simple Keyboard

The Simple Keyboard design is a very low-resolution picture of a very low-complexity user interface. Assuming you know binary machine code of course.

Glowing Screen

The Glowing Screen design by user alebur is a woman looking at a glowing desktop computer in a dim room.

Another round-up of new user-created generators. Some are classic billboards in big cities, some are less conventional (Bear Picnic, I’m looking at you). Enjoy! By the way, if you want to make your own generator, the power user page is a good place to start.

Tokyo Lights

The Tokyo Lights design is a cascade of billboards in a Japanese city.

Times Square Night

The Times Square Night design is a bright billboard on the side of Times Square, in the dark of night.

Mobile Billboard

The Mobile Billboard design is an ad on a mobile billboard truck.

Funny Poster

The Funny Poster design by user clydev is a woman looking at a poster (or the mirror) and smiling.

TV on Fridge

The TV on Fridge design by user udagawa is a TV sitting on a fridge, beside a PC. All the necessities of life.

Silver TV

The Silver TV design by user udagawa is a TV screen with a remote on a wooden counter.

Open Air Cinema

The Open Air Cinema design by user clydev is an outdoors movie screening.

Pronged Sculpture

The Pronged Sculpture design is a piece of art with an overlay.

Road of no return

The Road of no return design by user clydev is a billboard by a side of a windy, twisty road.

Couch Portrait

The Couch Portrait design is a comfy couch with space for a portrait-oriented picture behind it.

Bear Picnic

The Bear Picnic design is a bear at a picnic table, with his hairy paws on whatever you want.

Here’s a round-up of the new generators on MakeSweet this week:

Classic Cellphone

The Classic Cellphone design is a regular cellphone with your photo on its screen. Based on a public domain graphic made by tonyk, found in the Open ClipArt Library.

Mp3 Player

The Mp3 Player design is a stylized mp3 player with your photo on its screen. Based on a public domain graphic made by mckayc, found in the Open ClipArt Library.

Piccadilly Circus

The Piccadilly Circus design is a billboard at a busy intersection in London.

Pedestrian Crossing

The Pedestrian Crossing design is a billboard looming over a pedestrian crossing area.

Pot of Gold

The Pot of Gold design is a crock of gold at the end of a rainbow, full of gold coins with your loved one’s face on them (or whatever you want).

Sofa and Screen

The Sofa and Screen design is a screen behind a stylish couch.

Times Square

The Times Square design is a high, thin billboard set in crazy Times Square, New York.

Apartment Billboard

The Apartment Billboard design is a billboard placed over an apartment building. Hope noone is living behind it.

Skyscraper

The Skyscraper design is a billboard across the top of a gleaming skyscraper.

Hip Tattoo

The Hip Tattoo design is a tattoo just above the hips. Photo by bjornmeansbear, used here under a creative commons license. Our modifications are available under the same license.

750 Any Street

The 750 Any Street design is a billboard downtown, with the sky and a skyscraper in the background.

Revolutionary Sign

The Revolutionary Sign design is a billboard behind a stall for a left-leaning organization in Italy.

Back of a Van

The Back of a Van design is a space on the back door of a van.

We’ve made a nice and cheesy pot-of-gold animation for Saint Patrick’s day, coming up on March 17. Put a photo or text on the gold coins in a leprechaun’s stash at the end of the rainbow:

We’ve had a bit of internal disagreement about what the treasure in the pot should look like. Noemi thinks the rotating-glowing-globe looks silly. However, she admits that the number of leprechauns she’s met in her lifetime is in the single digits, so I don’t see how come she’s this big expert on pots of gold all of a sudden.

However, if you also think the coin-ball is daft, you can instead float a picture on the surface of the Chicago River, dyed green for Paddy’s day every year:

Enjoy!

User-created generators are showing up in a steady stream now, we’re happy to report. Some of our favorites:

• A street sign by JaySticLe, made with the Billboard GOG.
• A spinning button by runningdog, made with the Blender Generator Wizard.
• An iPhone screen by an anonymous user, made with the Billboard GOG.

You can browse more on the complete generator list. So as not to be lazy and leave everything to users, I made a generator too - a green-dyed river as a practice run for St. Patrick’s day. I would like to talk just a little bit about how I did it. The generator looks like this:

It is made exactly like a billboard with the Billboard GOG, with two important differences to the regular rectangular billboards most people are making:

• I wanted photos to be blended with the water, rather than on a blank background. So I unchecked the option for blanking the background. That part was easy.
• I wanted the photo to be behind the people on the bridge (and the bridge itself), and to lie within the borders of the river, which aren’t really straight. So I uploaded a “mask” I prepared in a drawing program (I use GIMP, but you can use Photoshop or anything like that).

The mask I used looked like this:

Preparing the mask took some time, but people who do photo editing regularly could probably do it much faster than I did. After the mask was uploaded, all I had to do was lay out a 3D rectangle that approximated the surface of the river. I did the geometrically correct thing, and it looked terrible. Photos of people would show with shrunken heads and vastly expanded necks, which is not very attractive. So I chose a more aesthetically pleasing (if less geometrically accurate) angle, and that worked out a lot better. It is funny how often taste and physics diverge in computer graphics…

We’ve added a tutorial for the Billboard Generator Generator (a tool that lets you project pictures or text on any flat surface). Support for masks has been improved, so it is even easier now to project to non-rectangular surfaces. For example, here’s a stop-sign generator:

And here are some boards created recently by users:

Notice JaySticLe’s use of masking for the fingers over the piece of paper on this last one.

(Update: fixed broken links to user boards, sorry about that…)

The back tattoo generator looks a little more human now. Honestly I don’t know what I was thinking before, with the ugly gray color and terrible lighting.

The picture and animation generators on MakeSweet are designed in Blender. and then converted to a high-speed cached form for the web. For a while now, it has been possible to submit blend files on the site and have them converted to a generator for you. This process has now been fully automated, with the new and improved Generator Wizard.

If you’re interested in learning more, there’s a tutorial write-up on making a custom cup generator. Basically the process is to first have a good idea:

Then implement it in Blender:

Then upload it and make a generator like any other picture mixer generator.

Easy!

The behind-the-scenes plumbing for all this is a little complicated, so we’d really appreciate feedback from Blender folk on this beta service. Thanks!

We recently added a new design for Valentine’s day (coming up next month) - a shower of hearts set against the rising sun:

By the way, all picture mixer designs now give the code needed to embed them directly in your site or blog.

Enjoy! We should probably do a design for anti-Valentine’s day too…