I started with amigurumi crochet by following patterns from kits, but one of the things that has been appealing to me about the craft is the prospect of designing my own. I'm not really a fan of trial-and-error or just winging it, one of the the things that I have found appealing about the craft is going from the pattern to a completed project in a relaxing orderly way. So one of the projects that I've wanted to do is to create a visualization program to help me make my own patterns. Unfortunately my first attempt at that fizzled, and that's one of the things that resulted in me falling out of the hobby for a while. But I've wanted to get unstuck on the project for a while and thought that the New Year Challenge would be a good place to start with that, since I'm hoping to get unstuck on a lot of things in 2021.
My old attempt at a software visualization tool got bogged down because I was trying to learn too much at once, so for this latest attempt I thought that the BabylonJS 3D engine would be a better starting point. It's a 3D engine that you control via javascript and renders in a browser. Since I thought getting the software working at all would be a bit of a challenge I thought that I would do a somewhat straightforward project from the creative side, just a crochet sphere where I could then set the colors of the individual stitches to spell out "2021" to meet the challenge criteria, and then have my program spit out the pattern with indications where I should do the color changes.
I had some old notes related to stitch sizes with the yarn and crochet hook I'd be using, so I started using those as the basis for calculating the geometry of the sphere. I didn't completely trust it though, so I did some tests and it turned out the numbers from my notes didn't really work. So I tweaked them a bit until I got something that was roughly spherical both in the real world and in my program.
I read about the New Year's Challenge when it was first posted and thought it would be a good project, but then had put it on the back burner while I did some Christmas stuff. It had stuck in my head that it was a New Year's Challenge so I had thought that the deadline would be the 31st, but when I checked a few days ago I realized the real deadline with the 28th (when I'm writing this), so I decided I needed to start rushing if I wanted to get finished, which was a bit stressful. My original plan was to do a slightly larger sphere so that I'd have more "pixels" to write out the 2021, but in order to attempt to get both the software and crochet parts done I decided to keep it pretty small. I managed to get the 3D engine part working, where clicking the mouse on a sphere that corresponds to a stich changes its color and that also updates a color in the corresponding pattern display.
I started working on the actual crochet part of it, and things looked pretty promising in the beginning...
But as more of the numbers starting being visible I started to get a sinking feeling. I tried to hold out hope that it would make sense if I just kept going, but that didn't really pan out.
So instead of saying 2021, I have a sphere with some incomprehsible purple squiggles. There are a couple of places things could have gone wrong. First, I'm guessing I had some miscounting problems so the rounds may not line up the way they're supposed to, and the way I represented the final pattern wasn't the easiest to use (since I was short on time I needed to make some compromises) so I wouldn't be surprised if I missed or duplicated sections while I was working from it. Second, there's probably some bugs in the process that translates the 3D sphere to the crochet pattern, I didn't really have a lot of time to debug that part, I spent so much time getting the "color change on mouse click" part working that I didn't think to double-check to see if the pattern actually made sense before trying to make it, I guess I naively assumed that part would work. Oh well. Everything ending up confusingly wrong is some bigtime 2020 energy, maybe this means I can leave all that behind and start fresh in the new year?
Even though the final result was a bit of a flop (and I'm not sure it's even technically a legal entry to the challenge since the 2021 didn't turn out right), I am still hopeful that the software stuff I did will work as a prototype for something better in the future that will let me design amigurumi characters the way I want to.