triangle field started as a simple sketch put together in a few hours on a sunday and its been good to see it evolving since. there’s that power of the triangle combined subtle shading that gives the impression of viewing something in 3d. its very simple and visually stunning. originally, i came across andy gilmore’s work on flickr and thought his geometric designs using triangles were beautiful and i couldn’t help to imagine what it would look like in motion. the shading between the triangles had to be smooth for it to maintain the illusion of 3d, so naturally if i ever want to create anything smooth looking or moving, i throw in some of the ol’ perlin noise.

triangle field :: 01 from lukasz on Vimeo.

the app is built in openframeworks, and along the way i wrote some life-hacker addons so i could have more control over the app at run-time with the idea that it will eventually become a live visual tool.

before writing the color picker addon, i would have to go into photoshop, select a colour i liked and manually copy the colour values into my code. you can imagine what a pain in the arse that was and not too mention time consuming. the colour picker is a replica of the mac osx colour picker in the way it looks with a couple extra modes. you can set it to automatically traverse through the colour spectrum – guess this is handy when you want a smooth colour transition to happen over a period of time. also there is a mode for random walk, where its kinda like watching an insect crawl around over the colour spectrum – where ever the inspect walks, the colour changes to its position.

ofxColorPicker

making visuals react to music is a pretty tricky thing to set up. firstly you need to do a fft analysis on the audio and apply windowing so that the lower parts of the spectrum look like they have the same sort of intensity as the higher frequencies. then you want to normalise the data so that values you get back fall between the range of 0 and 1 – this ensures you have the audio data under control.
i have now come to the conclusion that the fft analysis doesn’t have to be super accurate just as long as it looks good and is clear. my code is based on avsys and dave bollinger’s fft octana processing example (more on the OF forum). at the moment, the ofxFFT addon does two useful things, returns the normalised average audio power and returns a manipulated array of audio bands which ive used for distorting the triangle field.

in the openframeworks core (exculding addons) there are two possible ways of receiving audio data, one is from an audio file like an mp3 or wav and the other is through the microphone jack. the methods for getting this data are different but they both return the same type of information, so i created an abstract class called AudioAbstract which both AudioFileSpectrum and AudioLiveSpectrum extend. the idea is to be able to use file audio data and live audio data as if it was the same thing and be able to swap them out at run-time.

ofxFFT

triangle field :: 02 from lukasz on Vimeo.

Time Bomb – Interactive Graffiti (StupidKrap & Holler) from Mike Hill on Vimeo.

timebomb is an interactive graffiti installation that I collaborated on with Maddi Boyd (KissKiss) from StupidKrap. check out the promo video to see what its all about…

here’s a little technical insight into the project.

the timebomb application is based on memo’s fluid dynamics library for openframeworks, ofxmsafluid. its a fantastic opensource library that memo has done a lot of amazing things with and i’ve been able to use it as the basis for fluid time distortion.
interaction input comes from a webcam, the live feed is analysed and used to create ripples in a fluid image. those fluid values are then applied to the pixels of a video, the pure white pixel (0xFF) equals a pixel taken from the top frame of the video and a black pixel (0×00) equals a pixel taken from the bottom frame of the video, all other shades of grey represent pixels between the first and last frame. confused? well hopefully the video of the debug screen will explain it better.

the video on the top left is the actual time-lapse we shot over 5 days.
next to it is the final output with time distortion applied to it.
all other frames below show the camera input and the ripples created in a black and white fluid image.

timebomb debug from lukasz on Vimeo.

here is the final effect on its own.
this is what is going to be projected onto a blank canvas at the exhibition.
people will be able to time-distort the graffiti piece through their body movements and uncover the hidden layers that lay beneath the surface of the finished piece.

timebomb from lukasz on Vimeo.

the best feature of the software and what separates it from other vj tools is its integration of quartz composer which is a node based visual programming tool from apple. programming made easy! but it does tend to restrict you in some ways. put this feature together with your traditional video mixers and you have a pretty powerful tool on your hands.

the quartz composer patches that come with vdmx5 are pretty standard although with a little playing around and hooking them up to some waveforms you can achieve some interesting effects.

heres something ive composed using eraserhead snips. music from the new autechre album quaristice. spectrum analysis is controlling the glitch effects, the rest im inputting through a midi controller.

noisefield from julaps on Vimeo.