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Psychedelic Graphics 0: Introduction

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Re: Psychedelic Graphics 0: Introduction

#51
post #30

Slightly offtopic: Is there a way to do create meshes and animate them directly inside blender, pragmatically? Sort of like shadertoy, but instead of drawing, sculpting and rigging manually, I write some code that generates meshes and run shaders on them for effect?

Blender's deeply extensible and largely written in Python, but it also has full blown visual node programming language for procedurally modifying and generating textures, shaders, 3d geometry and meshes and parametric objects, etc! Actually Blender has an abstract base "Node" set of Python classes and user interfaces that you can subclass and tailor for different domains, to create all kinds of different domain of ap…

To help OP further, I don’t do any fancy manipulation but the boilerplate is present to grab geometry and futz with it:

https://github.com/emberian/blender-graphify

Maybe this can inspire some dabbling

Re: Psychedelic Graphics 0: Introduction

#52

I’ll be honest I’m far more interested in the rolling hills article that accompanies this one. Specifically about halfway through the process and applying: uv.x = uv.x + sin(time + uv.x * 30.0) * 0.02; uv.y = uv.y + sin(time + uv.y * 30.0) * 0.02; to the static image. Having experienced a range of psychedelic experiences in my life this appears to be the closest visually with the real thing, at least at low, non-hero…

It's probably not who you were talking about, but this account on YouTube does a good job of representing the visual experience, while also talking about other effects. The videos looking at nature, and the way the visuals start to form geometric patterns, and that "breathing" effect are powerful. The author covers various substances, and how the effects can be minor (slight "breathing" or pulsing of surfaces), to full geometric "worlds" (such as from DMT - although I've never dipped into that substance).

https://www.youtube.com/@josikinz

Re: Psychedelic Graphics 0: Introduction

#53

I’ll be honest I’m far more interested in the rolling hills article that accompanies this one. Specifically about halfway through the process and applying: uv.x = uv.x + sin(time + uv.x * 30.0) * 0.02; uv.y = uv.y + sin(time + uv.y * 30.0) * 0.02; to the static image. Having experienced a range of psychedelic experiences in my life this appears to be the closest visually with the real thing, at least at low, non-hero…

It's probably not who you were talking about, but this account on YouTube does a good job of representing the visual experience, while also talking about other effects. The videos looking at nature, and the way the visuals start to form geometric patterns, and that "breathing" effect are powerful. The author covers various substances, and how the effects can be minor (slight "breathing" or pulsing of surfaces), to fu…

That is not who I had in mind but after looking through their account I’m going to binge their videos, very cool stuff. I always found that studying the minute differences in these substances is such a genuinely interesting topic. It’s covered a lot in Mike Jay’s Psychonauts.

Re: Psychedelic Graphics 0: Introduction

#54
post #8

Reminds me of an old Flash classic in this area, Flashback.swf. Here's a video render of it: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KaSqrx93rS0

This video (back in the Flash days) is how I discovered the electronic group Shpongle. Their remix of Divine Moments of Truth is used in this animation. I believe the version is the "Russian Bootleg" version. I had been into electronic music before this, but this genre of electronic really blew my mind when I heard it.

Re: Psychedelic Graphics 0: Introduction

#55

Here's a classic video by Rudy Rucker demonstrating his CALab product that he made with John Walker at Autodesk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyZUzakG3bE At 24:28 he shows a running Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction mapped onto a 3d model's texture: https://youtu.be/lyZUzakG3bE?t=1468 I wrote about it in the discussion of John Walker passing away, and Josh Gordon, who worked on Chaos at Autodesk, joined the discussion…

There's so much about it that I love, but my favorite part of Rudy's CALab demo is the "Office of the Future" and 1-800 number at the end:

https://youtu.be/lyZUzakG3bE?t=2067

Re: Psychedelic Graphics 0: Introduction

#56

Regarding the OP doc and UV coordinates. A major area of investigation for us back in the day was finding interesting ways to displace the uv texture coordinates for each corner of the rectangular mesh. We used per-vertex colors, these days one would use a fragment (pixel) shader like those in ShaderToy. A very interesting process displaces the texture coordinates by advecting them along a flow field. Use any 2D vect…

That was how Jeremy Huxtable (inventor of the original NeWS "Big Brother" Eyes that inspired XEyes) PostScript "melt" worked: choose a random rectangle, blit it with a random offset, lather, rinse, repeat, showing how by repeating a very digital square, sharp, angular effect, with a little randomness (dithering), you get a nice smooth organic effect -- this worked fine in black and white too of course -- it's just Po…

Are these animated, or somesuch?

I tried naïvely using `ps2pdf` (Ghostscript), but got errors on both of them. I guess they're meant to be consumed by some other sort of system?

Re: Psychedelic Graphics 0: Introduction

#57
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I did not find anything psychedelic in the article or the pages linked from it.

the OP's YouTube channel is filled with videos made from these techniques: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVp8HfqWX9E&list=PLL81xI9jaV...

I've had countless LSD, DMT, and mushroom trips, as well as a few others, and nothing about that video reminds me about anything "psychedelic", not even close. I guess it's subjective but I have to wonder what was going on the their head when they decided "this looks psychedelic, let's call it psychedelic".

Re: Psychedelic Graphics 0: Introduction

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was how Jeremy Huxtable (inventor of the original NeWS "Big Brother" Eyes that inspired XEyes) PostScript "melt" worked: choose a random rectangle, blit it with a random offset, lather, rinse, repeat, showing how by repeating a very digital square, sharp, angular effect, with a little randomness (dithering), you get a nice smooth organic effect -- this worked fine in black and white too of course -- it's just Po…

Are these animated, or somesuch? I tried naïvely using `ps2pdf` (Ghostscript), but got errors on both of them. I guess they're meant to be consumed by some other sort of system?

Oh sorry I didn't explain: they're interactive PostScript scripts for the NeWS window system, so they don't actually print, they animate on the screen! The "pause" yields the light weight PostScript thread and lets the rest of the window system tasks run, and NeWS had an object oriented programming system that was used to implement the user interface toolkit, window managements, interactive from ends, and even entire applications written in object oriented PostSCript. NeWS is long obsolete, but you can run it in a Sun emulator!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS

For example, here's a heavily commented demo application called PizzaTool:

https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-story-of-sun-microsystems-...

Source code:

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/pizzatool.txt

It uses an iterated feedback pixel warping technique kind of like melt.ps, to spin the pizza rotationally, which melts the cheese and pizza toppings, instead of melting the screen by simply blitting random rectangles vertically like melt.ps -- note the randomization of the rotation to "dither" the rotation and smooth out the artifacts you'd get by always rotating it exactly the same amount:

  % Spin the pizza around a bit.
  %
  /Spin { % - => -
    gsave
      /size self send    % w h
      2 div exch 2 div exch   % w/2 h/2
      2 copy translate
      SpinAngle random add rotate
      neg exch neg exch translate  %
      self imagecanvas
     grestore
  } def
It animates rotating a bitmap around its center again and again as fast as you "spin" it with the mouse, plus a little jitter, so the jaggies of the rotation (not anti-aliased, 8 bit pixels, nearest neighbor sampling) give it a "cooked" effect!

It measures the size of the pizza canvas, translates to the center, rotates around the middle, then translates back to the corner of the image, then blits it with rotation and clipping to the round pizza window.

Re: Psychedelic Graphics 0: Introduction

#60

If anyone wants to play around with psychedelic graphics without going too low-level, [hydra]( https://hydra.ojack.xyz/ ) is a cool javascript based livecoding environment with a gentle learning curve.

Is there anything which supports music input? I liked Winamp era visualizers, but the art seems to be dead today.

I've been working on an free open-source macOS app for just that - https://nottawa.app Hoping to release in the next couple months!

The UI has been greatly improved since I took the original demo on the site, the real thing is MUCH better now. Same base idea - chain together shaders, videos, or webcams and then drive their parameters via an audio signal, BPM, oscillator, MIDI board, or manual sliders.

The beta link on the site isn't really worth trying yet - if you're interested in getting on the TestFlight just shoot me a message at joe@nottawa.app. Would love some HN feedback :)

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