Results in Reverse

Mandelbulb Shader

2010-07-02T22:09:00.006+02:00

Some months ago there was this article about a 3D fractal. Unlike the Quaternion Julia Set which is a 3D projection of a 4D fractal, this appears to be in real 3D space. Shortly after, there were some implementations of it on the GPU. One of it was the GLSL implementation from Inigo Quilez in his shader toy. I made a HLSL port of it for vvvv. You can download it shortly from the 'Contributions' section of our new website at vvvv.org.

Console Widget

2010-07-01T16:59:00.005+02:00

As I couldn't find a working solution to create a console window in a .NET application and display the Console.Write() calls in it, I created a little sourceforge project. Its written in C# and contains a Winforms UserControl to place it in your GUI and a Form to use it as a standalone window. It will route all text your application writes to the System.Console or the System.Diagnostics.Debug output to your GUI.

sourceforge.net/projects/consolewidget

Praxis Berlin Opening

2009-06-16T19:04:00.006+02:00

Believe it, the vvvv developers got a new headquarter in Berlin. Its newer, bigger and healthier than the former one. In fact, its the group practice for software developement and graphical matters. The grand opening is at june 20th. A dedicated website is waiting for you here: http://praxisberlin.net

Tonfilm live set with piano and drums

2009-01-07T20:04:00.006+01:00

This was a small gig in my old hometown at a friends party. I am glad to had Jens Otzen (Piano) and Gabriel Schütz (Drums) as guests. We played 5 tracks from the b-film node08 liveset. Here is a selection of 3:

vvvv40beta16 release with plugin interface

2008-05-22T01:28:00.004+02:00

The latest vvvv version offers developers an interface to write their own nodes for vvvv. A plugin is basically a .dll file, that can be drag&dropped into a vvvv patch where it appears as a node. If its stored in vvvv's plugins directory, its even available in the node list.
Currently value, color, matrix transform and string in/out pins are supported. Note that a plugin can also create a window. In theory one could write an openGL renderer with it...
We have prepared some simple templates to start from. Here is how to do it. The code can be browsed on sourceforge.

NODE08 live set

2008-04-16T00:27:00.002+02:00

As our live set at the node08 vvvvinissage was ended by firealarm (maybe someone understood the turkish text of the piece we played right before?), here is a full length version recorded some days before:

Screenshot Collection

2007-10-05T19:00:00.000+02:00

vvvv has this infamous ctrl+3 feature, to send screenshots directly to the vvvv wiki, where they appear in the site header. Some days ago I looked thru the gallery and collected all screenshots I could remember to be mine. Click here to see the huge page with all pictures. The page has some headlines, which are short technical descriptions of the method used to create the particular image. They are listed above the images as liks, to jump directly to the image positions.

Isosurface Raytracing Shader

2007-06-04T13:19:00.000+02:00

This little exercise uses Keenan Crane's rayracing algorithm from the quaternion julia set to render isosurfaces on the GPU. You can download the shader here. Here is a video from Paul Bourke's The Blob surface:

Sanch VJ Set On 4 Screens

2007-04-22T04:20:00.000+02:00

After Bruxelles sanch invited me to lille, where he made a VJ set on 4 screens with 4 times 1024x768 output in 60fps.

VVVVorkshop Bruxelles

2007-04-22T03:04:00.000+02:00

During the week from the 27th march gregsn and me held a vvvv workshop in bruxelles for the students of transmedians.

we also enjoyed our stay there. as you can see here, where gregsn played chess against boris from transmedians and me against a guy from the NATO, who invited us to some beers.

Lyapunov Exponent Shader

2007-02-18T17:57:00.000+01:00

The Lyapunov exponent is a measure of the stability of a dynamical system. It describes how much a small error of the input will affect the system. The calculation of the graph in the range -1 to 0 for a subset of the complex plane can produce very aesthetic pictuers. The implemantation as a pixel shader 3.0 code is very easy because its just an iteration for every point on the screen. The code for each pixel is as simpe as that:

// Compute single Lyapunov lambda value
float lyapunovExponent (const float2 ab)
{

double r;
double sum = 0;
double x = xStart;
int k;

for(k = 0; k < MaxIter+WarmUp; k++){

r = sequence(k) ? ab.x : ab.y;

x = r * x * ( 1-x );

if (k >= WarmUp) sum += log( r - 2*r*x );

}

return sum/MaxIter;

}

Where ab is a 2D point in the complex plane, which is related to the pixel position on the screen and sequence(k) is a simple function, which chooses the x or y coordinate for each iteration.
Here is the download and here a picture:

Fractal Shader

2007-02-13T00:59:00.000+01:00

Joreg found a demo scene link with an easy to implement fractal shader for Mandelbrot and Julia fractals. Download here.

HD Video Rendering With Realtime FFT Data

2007-02-12T23:45:00.000+01:00

For this little project the FFT data of a 3 minute song was recorded with 60 fps into more than 10000 text files, where each text file got a timestamp in its file name. During the rendering the text file with closest timestamp to the current rendering time was read and processed into parameters of a 3D-object which is based on Johan Gielis superformula.
A small video is here, and here some frames in full 3840x2400 resolution (which obviously where resized by blogger on upload).

StereoMix Audio Input For Dell Laptops

2007-01-26T19:15:00.002+01:00

Finally there is a solution for my Dell Inspiron 9400 to get a "Stereo Mix" audio input channel to route the sound output from one application to another. This might work with other laptops, which have a Sigmatel 92XX C-Major chip:

Follow this link: http://us.lgservice.com
Go to: Device Driver
In product, select: “Notebook”
OS: "WindowsXP"
Search subject: “Sigmatel”
The download the result: "[Sound/2000/XP] SigmaTel Sound Driver Ver 5.10.0.4866 XNOTE(LE50)" or similar
After Download, install the driver and reboot
Turn up the volume of the Stereo Mix input in the windows mixer...

Calculate Normals In Shader

2007-01-23T00:23:00.000+01:00

The common method to calculate vertex normals for a mesh is to use the neighbour vertices to determine the orientation of the surface with subtraction of the positions and the cross product to get the normal vector.
Calculating the vertex normals for a mesh in a shader is usually impossible, because there is no access to the neighbours. So, if you have a mesh with no normals you have to calculate the normals on the CPU side.
But all this changes to a quite easy task, if you are working with dynamic meshes and you have a formula to describe the mesh in the following form: f(u, v) = (x, y, z). With that formula you are able to reach every point on the mesh surface, hence its easy to do all in the shader. Assuming the input mesh is a grid in the xy-plane, we first scale and offset the grid to get the input space we want, then we calculate the new position of the vertex by using the x and y coordinates of the current vertex as u and v in the formula. After that we get two neighbours by calculating two other positions with a small offset in u and v direction. A pseudo vertex shader code could look like this:

u = pos.x * scale + offset ;
v = pos.y * scale + offset ;

pos = f(u, v);

neighbour1 = f(u+smallvalue, v);
neighbour2 = f(u, v+smallvalue);

tangent = neighbour1 - pos;
bitangent = neighbour2 - pos;

normal = cross(tanget, bitanget);

nice, eh? now go looking for some mesh functions ;)

If you haven't enough yet, you can improve the shading smoothnes by calculating the neighbours and normals in the pixel shader. Thats especially good, if the resolution of the input grid is not so high. For that, after calculating the position, pass the u and v values to the pixel shader and do all remainding stuff there. Read the forums discussion from where the idea is and the download here.
Finally a picture of the supersmooth pixel shader implementation:

Open Visuals Update

2007-01-14T18:56:00.000+01:00

As we got a new date at March 17th at the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, my friend Johannes Guerreiro and I have updated the site of our interactive project Open Visuals. We also registered the domain www.openvisuals.de. The concept of this installation is to give the visitors the feeling of being a VJ. For that we coded a 3D-Engine with vvvv and an interface for the Behringer BCR2000 midi controller. With it, the visitor can control several parameters of music reactive motion graphics which are fully generated in realtime.

Here is a picture of the impressive building of the Kunstmuseum in the heart of Stuttgart:

D Programming Language 1.0 released

2007-01-13T22:24:00.000+01:00

The first official version of the D progamming language is released. It seems to be a good alternative to the meanwhile 20 years old C++. I'v coded some lines with it and loved it. The language is easy to write with a clean syntax, has great features and performance.

As IDE I recommend Code::Blocks, but there are others, follow the links from the D site.

Another Quaternion Julia Fractal Video

2006-11-28T16:00:00.000+01:00

This little video is the first rendering i've done with my new laptop. Download the shader at my patches page.

High Resolution 3D Rendering

2006-11-03T02:21:00.000+01:00

Here are some more superformula and related pictures in 7500x7500 resolution. See them all at sanch's site.

Superformula Vertex Shader 2.0

2006-10-28T22:28:00.000+02:00

During my latest work time at meso in Frankfurt/Main i had the chance to chat with my old flatmate Sanch. One night around 3 o'clock we talked about further developement of the super formula vertex shader we released some month ago. The first version of the shader was quite simple: The input is a grid mesh with range -0.5 to 0.5 in both axis and a resolution of 20*20 vertices or higher. Inside the vertex shader the grid gets transformed by a regular matrix transform. This transformed grid is the "input space" for the 3D superformula which you can find on paul bourke's site. Gregsn did a great job, as he added the calculation of the normals for shading inside the shader.
Now the idea was to replace the matrix transform of the grid by another 2D superformula to get a more interesting input space. Sanch has implemented the idea and you can see the first promising results on his site. Download the first version of the shader at the vvvv shader site.

Mercedes Benz Trade Fair 2006

2006-10-27T00:37:00.000+02:00

Another fine meso project. "Presafe" and "E-Class Features" are my work. See project page for details.

Interactive Cocktail Bar

2006-09-14T02:16:00.000+02:00

A nice meso project. I made the vvvv programming for the project: video tracking with 2 PAL cams, infra red light and the output animations on two beamers using pixel shaders from gregsn and sanch and me. most difficult part was to equalize the displaced and distorted cam input. output is 2048x768 at 60fps. project page

Free Cross Platform C++ Developement

2006-08-21T02:45:00.000+02:00

just a note:

IDE::
Code::Blocks
Ultimate++ IDE
Eclipse CDT

GUI::
wxWidgets
Ultimate++

3D and Video::
glfw
SDL
Ogre3D
Irrlicht

vvvv 11.1 Release

2006-07-31T21:35:00.000+02:00

go to get it: Downloads

Quaternion Julia Set Video

2006-07-11T00:00:00.000+02:00

One day, someone pointed me to a quternion julia fractal pixel shader from keenan crane. I was able to port it into hlsl to use it with vvvv. the vvvv user rand526 created this amazing video with it:

download the shader here.

vvvv Website Redesign

2006-06-25T20:19:00.000+02:00

Nice new design of the vvvv wiki:

vvvv.org

Superformula Vertex Shader

2006-06-21T02:28:00.000+02:00

Gregsn, Sanch and me have implemented a hlsl vertex shader for Johan Gielis superformula. Sanch created some impressive scenes as he combined the shader with the spreading technology of vvvv:

Have a look at all pictures!

Download the shader

Software Project

2006-06-10T05:08:00.000+02:00

Ok, that's my first reasonable entry. Its a pitty that i don't have a lot spare time. study, study, study... but there are interesting things. In the near future we will finish our software project called ESEL. Its a simulator for logical circuits, using AND, OR, NOT, etc. gates and wires to connect them. A tiny little vvvv written in java. Most powerful feature is loading additional gates at runtime out of .jar files.

screenshot: