7 ms·

Psychedelic Graphics 0: Introduction

306 points by tasshin 2y ago

calebm 2y ago
https://gods.art/math_videos/strange_faces_thumb.html https://gods.art/math_videos/strange_faces_thumb.html
2-3-7-43-1807 2y ago
And where are the psychedelic graphics now?
- leptons 2y ago
  Yeah, I did not find anything psychedelic in the article or the pages linked from it.
  - mwfogleman 2y ago
    the OP's YouTube channel is filled with videos made from these techniques: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVp8HfqWX9E&list=PLL81xI9jaV3Gr2kb3VASX7maReetK2t7O&index=11 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVp8HfqWX9E&list=PLL81xI9jaV...
    - leptons 2y ago
      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".
VinLucero 2y ago
Very cool explanation between time as a variable and graphical design “aberrations”
brotchie 2y ago
If this is your kind of thing and you ever get a chance to see the musical artist Tipper alongside Fractaled Visions driving the visuals, you’re in for a treat. Most spot on visual depictions of psychedelic artifacts I’ve witnessed. Saw them together last year and it’s the no. 1 artistic experience of my life. The richness, and complexity of Fractaled Vision’s visuals are almost unbelievable. Even knowing a lot about shader programming, etc. some of the effects I was like “wtf how did he do that”. Here’s the set, doesn’t fully capture the experience, but gives a feel: Seeing this in 4k at 60fps was next level. https://youtu.be/qMcqw12-eSk?si=R5mCaIbR01w3Tbyv https://youtu.be/qMcqw12-eSk?si=R5mCaIbR01w3Tbyv
- yieldcrv 2y ago
  ooo I was there
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
alanbernstein 2y ago
This might have been written just for me, I love the premise. I am truly fascinated by people who attempt to reproduce the actual physiological vision effects of psychedelic drugs. Psychoactive drugs can be probes into the inner workings of our minds - in some scientific sense - and exploring the vision effects seems likely to suggest interesting things about how our visual system works. Mostly, I am just impressed when anyone is able to capture the visual experience in graphical effects, with any level of realism.
- caseyohara 2y ago
  > Mostly, I am just impressed when anyone is able to capture the visual experience in graphical effects, with any level of realism. I have to say that the cliche of super bright, super saturated, geometric or melty shapes like in the article are not a great reproduction of the typical visual effects of psychedelics. Apart from very high doses, the visual effects are much more subtle. The /r/replications subreddit has GIFs and short videos with a much higher degree of realism https://www.reddit.com/r/replications/top/?t=year https://www.reddit.com/r/replications/top/?t=year
- helboi4 2y ago
  This is 100% not what psychedelics look like. It's generally just mildly more saturated colours and the feeling that everything is possibly breathing or swaying in a more natural way. I dunno what happens if you take insane amounts tbf. I always thought that psychedelic art was a bit more about the sort of thing that is super appealing to look at while tripping.
  - icameron 2y ago
    The trick is go out of body. Eyes closed and let your mind create all the visuals. Then its like being in alex grey land
    - helboi4 2y ago
      True, more interesting things happen when you close your eyes.
dghf 2y ago
> Basically any color that humans can perceive can be created from a mixture of these three colors. Many, but not any. No finite set of real primary colours can produce every perceivable colour. Some will always be out of gamut.
trollied 2y ago
This needs a link to shadertoy https://www.shadertoy.com https://www.shadertoy.com
- Falimonda 2y ago
  Wow! Thanks for sharing that!
AndrewStephens 2y ago
I love how easy it is to write shaders that operate on images in HTML. My skills in this area are mediocre but I love seeing how far people can take it. Even providing a simple approximation of a depth map can really make the results interesting. Some years ago I did a similar project to smoothly crossfade (with "interesting effects") between images using some of the same techniques. My writeup (and a demo): https://sheep.horse/2017/9/crossfading_photos_with_webgl_-_boston_bridge_proj.html https://sheep.horse/2017/9/crossfading_photos_with_webgl_-_b...
jasonjmcghee 2y ago
The fully interactive nature of the post is such a great way to communicate about a topic. Also it's just really clean design. Appreciate you taking the time!
cess11 2y ago
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 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KaSqrx93rS0
- progmetaldev 2y ago
  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.
satyarthms 2y ago
If anyone wants to play around with psychedelic graphics without going too low-level, [hydra](https://hydra.ojack.xyz/ https://hydra.ojack.xyz/) is a cool javascript based livecoding environment with a gentle learning curve.
- jerjerjer 2y ago
  Is there anything which supports music input? I liked Winamp era visualizers, but the art seems to be dead today.
  - satyarthms 2y ago
    Hydra actually works well with music input! It grabs audio from the mic and `a.show()` will show you the frequency bins. Then any numerical parameter can be modulated by the intensity of a bin, for example: `noise().thresh(()=>a.fft[0]*2).out()`
    - jerjerjer 2y ago
      > It grabs audio from the mic Is it possible to grab from default audio output device instead of mic? Probably not as it's browser based. I suppose mic can be faked on OS level somehow.
  - progmetaldev 2y ago
    I used to spend so much time messing around with MilkDrop in Winamp. You could grab existing visualizations and see what they were doing, and make your own edits. Thanks for the nostalgia hit!
    - jerjerjer 2y ago
      MilkDrop 3 latest release was in 2023! https://github.com/milkdrop2077/MilkDrop3/releases/tag/MilkDrop3 https://github.com/milkdrop2077/MilkDrop3/releases/tag/MilkD... Thank you, that's exactly what I'm looking for.
  - 2y ago
openrisk 2y ago
Fun thing: in relativity u,v are typical variable names used for a really funky coordinate transformation that mixes space and time, sometimes called Penrose coordinates [1]. So when I saw this: > uv.x = uv.x + sin(time + uv.x * 50.0) * 0.01; > uv.y = uv.y + sin(time + uv.y * 50.0) * 0.01; I thought, wow, what on Earth is going on here? But no, it turns out that its not that psychedelic. They could have used p,q or any other variable pair but its still quite interesting geometrically [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose_diagram https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose_diagram [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UV_mapping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UV_mapping
mbreese 2y ago
The next link in the series was better, IMHO. https://benpence.com/blog/post/psychedelic-graphics-1 https://benpence.com/blog/post/psychedelic-graphics-1 This gets more into how to introduce motion and new visuals instead of the building blocks. The rolling hills graphic was really interesting.
mwfogleman 2y ago
Here's a music video the OP and I made with these techniques: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GOciie5Pjk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GOciie5Pjk
JansjoFromIkea 2y ago
a bit of a tangent but I'm surprised how heavily visualisers and the like always seem to focus on packing in as much colour as possible. With OLED screens it feels like there's a ton of potential for making really great black-heavy ambient visuals that so an idle TV can become a feature of a room's decor rather than just a big black rectangle in the middle of it.
- fourteenfour 2y ago
  Yeah, I have an older LG and it has a disappointingly simple 4k fireworks visualization when it "sleeps" that always makes me wish I could create a custom replacement.
cancerhacker 2y ago
Early 90s, Todd Rundgren realized a Mac App called Flowfazer - it didn’t simulate your experience but was helpful as a distraction to move you along. Some people used it to provide guidance for their own creations.[2] [1] https://grokware.com/ https://grokware.com/ [2] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3Z4X4FmIhIw https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3Z4X4FmIhIw It was a time of screensavers and palette animation.
sowut 2y ago
nice
CodeWriter23 2y ago
That humanoid figure, looks like dude is getting some bad acid.
DonHopkins 2y ago
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 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 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: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39300605 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39300605 >DonHopkins 11 months ago | parent | context | favorite | on: John Walker, founder of Autodesk, has died >I really love and was deeply inspired by the great work that John Walker did with Rudy Rucker on cellular automata, starting with Autodesk's product CelLab, then James Gleick's CHAOS -- The Software, Rudy's Artificial Life Lab, John's Home Planet, then later the JavaScript version WebCA, and lots of extensive documentation and historical information on his web page. CelLab: https://www.fourmilab.ch/cellab/ https://www.fourmilab.ch/cellab/ https://www.fourmilab.ch/cellab/classic/ https://www.fourmilab.ch/cellab/classic/ https://www.fourmilab.ch/homeplanet/ https://www.fourmilab.ch/homeplanet/ https://www.rudyrucker.com/oldhomepage/cellab.htm https://www.rudyrucker.com/oldhomepage/cellab.htm [...] >josh_gordon 11 months ago | prev [–] >I'm amazed that my beloved CHAOS still runs beautifully on emulators like DOSbox. It was the last programming project where I could completely roll my own interface - and maybe my last really fun one. Here's some stuff I did that was inspired by Rudy Rucker and John Walker's work, as well as Tommaso Toffoli and Norm Margolus's wonderful book, "Cellular Automata Machines: A New Environment for Modeling": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37035627 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37035627 by DonHopkins on Aug 7, 2023 | parent | context | favorite | on: My history with Forth and stack machines (2010) >"Cellular Automata Machines: A New Environment for Modeling" is one of my favorite books of all time! It shows lots of peculiarly indented Forth code. https://donhopkins.com/home/cam-book.pdf https://donhopkins.com/home/cam-book.pdf >CAM6 Simulator Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyLMHxRNuck https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyLMHxRNuck >Forth source code for CAM-6 hardware: https://donhopkins.com/home/code/tomt-cam-forth-scr.txt https://donhopkins.com/home/code/tomt-cam-forth-scr.txt https://donhopkins.com/home/code/tomt-users-forth-scr.txt https://donhopkins.com/home/code/tomt-users-forth-scr.txt And a couple more recent videos to music using the SimCity/Micropolis tile set and WebGL tile engine to display cells: SimCity Tile Sets Space Inventory Cellular Automata Chill Resolve 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=319i7slXcbI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=319i7slXcbI I performed it in real time in response to the music (see the demo below to try it yourself), and there's a particularly vivid excursion that starts here: https://youtu.be/319i7slXcbI?t=314 https://youtu.be/319i7slXcbI?t=314 The following longer demo starts out with an homage to "Powers of 10", and is focused on SimCity, but shows how you can switch between simulators with different rules and parameters, like setting rings of fire with the heat diffusion cellular automata, then switching to the city simulator to watch it all burn as the fires spread out and leave ashes behind, then switching back to another CA rule to zap it back into another totally different pattern (you can see a trail of destruction left by not-Godzilla at 0:50 while the city simulator is running). I had to fix some bugs in the original SimCity code so it didn't crash when presented with the arbitrarily scrambled tile arrangements that the CA handed it -- think of it as fuzz testing; due to the sequential groups of 9 tiles for 3x3 zones, and the consecutive arrangements of different zone type and growth states, the smoothing heat diffusion creates all these smeared out concentric rings of zones for the city simulator to animate and simulate, like rings of water, looping animations of fire, permutations of roads and traffic density, rippling smokestacks, spinning radars, burbling fountains, an explosion animation that ends in ash, etc. Chaim Gingold's "SimCity Reverse Diagrams" visually describes the SimCity tiles, simulator, data models, etc: https://smalltalkzoo.thechm.org/users/Dan/uploads/SimCityReverseDiagrams.pdf https://smalltalkzoo.thechm.org/users/Dan/uploads/SimCityRev... Micropolis Web Space Inventory Cellular Automata Music 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBVyCpmVQew https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBVyCpmVQew You can play with it here. Click the "X" in the upper left corner to get rid of the about box, use the space bar to toggle between SimCity and Cellular Automata mode, the letters to switch between cities, + and - switch between tile sets (the original SimCity monochrome tiles are especially nice for cleansing the palette between blasts of psychedelic skittles rainbows, and the medieval theme includes an animated retro lores 8 bit pixel art knight on a horse), the digits to control the speed, and 0 toggles pause. (It's nice to slow down and watch close up, actually!): https://micropolisweb.com/ https://micropolisweb.com/ As you can see it's really fun to play with to music and cannabis, but if you're going to use any harder stuff I recommend you get used to it first and have a baby sitter with you. Actually the whole point of my working on this for decades is so that you don't need the harder stuff, and you can put it on pause when you mom calls in the middle of your trip and you have to snap back to coherency, and close the tab when you've had enough.
tylertyler 2y ago
I've been writing webgl shaders at work this week and noodling with the details to make things look like physical camera effects but occasionally I'll get something wrong and see results that look similar to the stuff in this article and I have to say it is just so much more fun than the standard image effects. Sure there might be limited use cases for it visually but playing with the models we've built up around how graphics in computers work are a great way to learn about the each one of these systems. Not just graphics but fundamental math in programming, how GPUs work and their connection to memory and CPUs, how our eyes work, how to handle animation/time, and so on.
byearthithatius 2y ago
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- deleted 2y ago
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DonHopkins 2y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33105030 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33105030 >deepnet on Oct 6, 2022 | parent | context | favorite | on: Recording the Grateful Dead: The Culture of Tapers >The overlap between early nerd culture and The Grateful Dead was very significant. >Taping and sharing culture and its benefits were very apparent in many net forums. >As were democratisation of the new tools, public terminals with BBS access and the Deadheads community spirit exemplified on Usenet and Arpanet. >Look no further than John Perry Barlow, EFF co-founder and his Manifesto of Cyberspace - he was a Grateful Dead Lyricist ! https://www.wired.com/2016/02/its-been-20-years-since-this-man-declared-cyberspace-independence https://www.wired.com/2016/02/its-been-20-years-since-this-m... >Barlow's paradigm seems cheeky without awareness of the Net's public roots, how it came up through BBS and Fidonet culture, is forgotten by those who only saw the view of the Net as a gift from the ivory towers of academia and the military rather than bedroom z80 & 6502 modem culture. q.v. Fidonet BBS documentary https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Dddbe9OuJLU https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Dddbe9OuJLU DonHopkins on Oct 6, 2022 [–] >In another comment reply to Gumby, I mentioned how I often accidentally call them "Grateful Dead Conferences", because so many tech people I knew and worked with in Silicon Valley and the Free Software community and regularly saw at computer conferences and trade shows would show up at Dead shows. >The Raster Masters would lug enormous million dollar high end SGI workstations across North Shoreline Boulevard from SGI headquarters to Shoreline Amphitheater, and actually pack them into trucks and travel on tour with the Dead, performing live improvisational psychedelic graphics on the screen behind the band in real time to their live music, using an ensemble of custom software they wrote themselves, mixing together and feeding back the video of several SGI workstations in real time. >At one concert, some hippie came up to me, pointed at the graphics on the screen behind the stage in awe, and said, "I took all these shrooms, I'm tripping my balls off, and you would not fucking believe what they're making me seeing on the screen up there!!!" I explained to him that I hadn't taken any shrooms, but I could see the exact same thing! >The Raster Masters wrote and performed their own software, which reflected the taping and sharing culture of the Dead scene, including ElectroPaint and the Panel Library from NASA, whose source code and recorded live performances were distributed with SGI's demo software and free source code library. >The improvisational software was like a musical instrument performed in real time along with the music. [...Lots more stuff with links and videos at the link:...] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33105030 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33105030
z3phyr 2y ago
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?
- zipy124 2y ago
  Yes, all of blender is extensible with python, and last time I used it in a project in university it was surpisingly easy to do too.
- DonHopkins 2y ago
  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 application specific visual programming languages. So visually programming 2d video filters, GPU shaders, 3D geometry, animations, constraints, state machines, simulations, procedural city generators, etc, and each can have their own compilation/execution model, tailored user interface, node libraries, and connection types. Geometry nodes have the visual programming language equivalent of lambdas, functions you can pass to other functions that parameterize and apply them repeatedly, iterating over 3d geometry, texture pixels, etc. Blender extensions can add nodes to the existing languages and even define their own new visual programming languages. So you can use a bunch of integrated tightly focused domain specific visual programming languages together, instead of trying to use one giant general purpose but huge incoherent "uber" language (cough cough Max/MSP/Jitter cough). https://docs.blender.org/manual/nb/2.79/render/blender_render/materials/nodes/introduction.html https://docs.blender.org/manual/nb/2.79/render/blender_rende... What are Geometry Nodes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMDB7c0ZiKA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMDB7c0ZiKA Geometry Nodes From Scratch: https://studio.blender.org/training/geometry-nodes-from-scratch/ https://studio.blender.org/training/geometry-nodes-from-scra... Free blender City Generator Addon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nLsew8I7KM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nLsew8I7KM Here's a paid product, an incredibly detailed and customizable city generator (and traffic simulator!) that shows off what you can do with Geometry Nodes, well worth the price just to play with as a video game, and learning geometry nodes: Using The City Generator 2.0 in Blender | Tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRHkGoTQKM8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRHkGoTQKM8 How to Create Procedural Buildings | Blender Geometry Nodes | Procedural City: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGgAEp-n0uk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGgAEp-n0uk
dtristram 2y ago
Hi, David Tristram here. founding member of Raster Masters, 1990's computer graphics performance ensemble. As @hopkins has mentioned, we used high end Silicon Graphics workstations to create synthetic imagery to accompany live music, including notably the Grateful Dead, Herbie Hancock, and Graham Nash. After many iterations I'm currently working mainly in 2D video processing environments, Resolume Avenue and TouchDesigner. The links here are inspiring, thanks for posting.
- DonHopkins 2y ago
  Who were the other people in Raster Masters, and what crazy stories from Grateful Dead concerts can you tell? ;) Every time I've ever plugged in a modern projector into a laptop at a presentation it's so stressful, like rolling the dice if the screen will ever come up. What kind of a projector and calibration and preparation did it take to project live hires SGI video onto the screen above the band?
  - actionfromafar 2y ago
    I would guess either https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eidophor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eidophor or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talaria_projector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talaria_projector https://www.ebay.com/itm/225229726689 https://www.ebay.com/itm/225229726689 https://web.archive.org/web/20250124121654/https://www.ebay.com/itm/225229726689 https://web.archive.org/web/20250124121654/https://www.ebay....
    - DonHopkins 2y ago
      Wow glad I asked, thanks for the links -- TIL about wobbulators! Definitely on my xmas shopping list for my retro electronics freak friends. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talaria_projector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talaria_projector >RGB color separation and processing is obtained using vertical wobbulation of the electron beam on the oil film to modulate the green channel and sawtooth modulation is added to the horizontal sweep to separate and modulate Red and Blue channels. The optical system used in the Talaria line is a Schlieren optic like an Eidophor, but the color extraction is much more complex. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wobbulator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wobbulator >A wobbulator is an electronic device primarily used for the alignment of receiver or transmitter intermediate frequency strips. It is usually used in conjunction with an oscilloscope, to enable a visual representation of a receiver's passband to be seen, hence simplifying alignment; it was used to tune early consumer AM radios. The term "wobbulator" is a portmanteau of wobble and oscillator. A "wobbulator" (without capitalization) is a generic term for the swept-output RF oscillator described above, a frequency-modulated oscillator, also called a "sweep generator" by most professional electronics engineers and technicians.[1] A wobbulator was used in some old microwave signal generators to create what amounted to frequency modulation. It physically altered the size of the klystron cavity, therefore changing the frequency. Samwell & Hutton Ruggedized CT501 Wobbulator (1968) NSN: 6625-99-620-2403 https://www.ebay.com/itm/267012403603?_skw=wobbulator&itmmeta=01JJD1M5AHTK1468TVK5QYTSJ7&hash=item3e2b2df193:g:xG0AAOSwD2FkjRmu&itmprp=enc%3AAQAJAAAAwHoV3kP08IDx%2BKZ9MfhVJKn0K1YnrZfa2kdHsIL886YnFwpGtjuKgLqIjB9OkBLKydgnOMNf4Iyca2DR7N56hix02aXOyucw58M71MWXX%2BKbdHcI%2BfRxa83zNBn89kGAyzXjpzPC0YcyLBokFnN7LirihTQL1IWupYw8wAkwFJO6BiyXAxyJyxtywcRaGaXp%2BUBfVkz3cEtBWz6sdKR%2F4lGklFeG%2FqgMvg46hK2%2FOzCCWOxlpeqIwdsB0pM%2BI9rlHA%3D%3D%7Ctkp%3ABk9SR7DV0KGTZQ https://www.ebay.com/itm/267012403603?_skw=wobbulator&itmmet...
dtristram 2y ago
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 vector field and apply displacement to each coordinate iteratively. Even inaccurate explicit methods give good results. After the coordinates have been distorted to a far distance, the image becomes unrecognizable. A simple hack is to have a "restore" force applied to the coordinates, and they spring back to their original position, like flattening a piece of mirroring foil. Just now I am using feedback along with these displacement effects. Very small displacements applied iteratively result in motion that looks quite a bit like fluid flow.
- DonHopkins 2y ago
  Aaaah, remember the simple directly manipulative pleasures of Kai Power Goo: LGR: Kai's Power Goo – Classic 90s Funware for PC! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xt06OSIQ0PE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xt06OSIQ0PE
- DonHopkins 2y ago
  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 PostScript: https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/news-tape/fun/melt/melt.ps https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/news-tape/fun/melt/m... %! % % Date: Tue, 26 Jul 88 21:25:03 EDT % To: NeWS-makers@brillig.umd.edu % Subject: NeWS meltdown % From: eagle!icdoc!Ist!jh@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU (Jeremy Huxtable) % % I thought it was time one of these appeared as well.... % NeWS screen meltdown % % Jeremy Huxtable % % Mon Jul 25 17:36:06 BST 1988 % The procedure "melt" implements the ever-popular screen meltdown feature. /melt { 3 dict begin /c framebuffer newcanvas def framebuffer setcanvas clippath c reshapecanvas clippath pathbbox /height exch def /width exch def pop pop c /Transparent true put c /Mapped true put c setcanvas 1 1 1000 { pop random 800 mul random 600 mul random width 3 index sub mul random height 2 index sub mul 4 2 roll rectpath 0 random -5 mul copyarea pause } for framebuffer setcanvas c /Mapped false put /c null def end } def melt Here's Jeremy's original "Big Brother" eye.ps, that was the quintessential demo of round NeWS Eyeball windows: https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/news-tape/fun/eye/eye.ps.old.txt https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/news-tape/fun/eye/ey...
coffeecantcode 2y ago
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-heroic, doses. Maybe slow the waves down and lessen the range of motion a bit. Note: I am far more interested in replicating the visual hallucinations induced by psychedelic compounds than by making cool visuals for concerts and shows, utmost respect for both sets of artists though. There is an artist (and I’m sure many more) who does a fantastic job with psychedelic visuals using fully modern stacks to edit, unfortunately their account name entirely escapes me. I’ll comment below if I find it. The comparison that I would make with this portion of the Rolling Hills article would be the mushroom tea scene from Midsommar, specifically with the tree bark. The effect of objects “breathing” and flowing is such a unique visual and I love to see artists accomplishing it in different ways.
- progmetaldev 2y ago
  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 https://www.youtube.com/@josikinz
  - coffeecantcode 2y ago
    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.
epiccoleman 2y ago
Ben - so glad I stumbled on this article. Love this kind of graphical stuff (I'm a huge sucker for psychedelia) and I really enjoyed your videos on your channel. Thanks for sharing!
rikroots 2y ago
If we're sharing, this is my effort at psychedelic graphics - animating a gradient over a live video feed (all done using a boring 2D canvas, because I don't have the brain capacity for shaders) over on CodePen: https://codepen.io/kaliedarik/pen/MWMQyJZ https://codepen.io/kaliedarik/pen/MWMQyJZ
whism 2y ago
I write semi-psychedelic paint and video mixing software for personal use. Here’s a video from last year of mixing a few things together, hopefully some here enjoy it :) https://youtu.be/IgpcJN4qAAg?si=Khq6U1nxXi-9n73A https://youtu.be/IgpcJN4qAAg?si=Khq6U1nxXi-9n73A
b4ckup 2y ago
Really interesting! I'm very much interested in pychedelic graphics. I played around with shadertoy a little bit maybe I should give it another go. For anyone interested I made some cool visuals by interpolating prompts in stable diffusion 1.5 like https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ajfMlJuDswc https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ajfMlJuDswc. I found that the older diffusion models are better for abstract graphics as it looks more "raw" and creative.
DonHopkins 2y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33071119 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33071119 DonHopkins 11 months ago | parent | context | favorite | on: John Walker, founder of Autodesk, has died Jim Crutchfield is DOCTOR CHAOS -- he's got a PhD in Complexity Science! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4Kn3djJMCE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4Kn3djJMCE Space-Time Dynamics in Video Feedback A film by Jim Crutchfield, Entropy Productions, Santa Cruz (1984). Original U-matic video transferred to digital video. 16 minutes. James P. Crutchfield. Center for Nonlinear Studies, Los Alamos National Laboratories, Los Alamos, NM 87545, USA. ABSTRACT: Video feedback provides a readily available experimental system to study complex spatial and temporal dynamics. This article outlines the use and modeling of video feedback systems. It includes a discussion of video physics and proposed two models for video feedback based on a discrete-time iterated functional equation and on a reaction-diffusion partial differential equation. Color photographs illustrate results from actual video experiments. Digital computer simulations of the models reproduce the basic spatio-temporal dynamics found in the experiments. 1. In the beginning there was feedback ... James P. Crutchfield. "Space-Time Dynamics in Video Feedback." Physica 10D 1984: 229-245. [pdf] https://csc.ucdavis.edu/~cmg/papers/Crutchfield.PhysicaD1984 https://csc.ucdavis.edu/~cmg/papers/Crutchfield.PhysicaD1984... [Plates 1-4] https://csc.ucdavis.edu/~cmg/papers/Crutchfield.PhysicaD1984.Plates1_4.jpg https://csc.ucdavis.edu/~cmg/papers/Crutchfield.PhysicaD1984... [Plates 5-7] https://csc.ucdavis.edu/~cmg/papers/Crutchfield.PhysicaD1984.Plates5_7.jpg https://csc.ucdavis.edu/~cmg/papers/Crutchfield.PhysicaD1984... https://csc.ucdavis.edu/~chaos/ https://csc.ucdavis.edu/~chaos/

306 points by tasshin 2y ago

calebm 2y ago

https://gods.art/math_videos/strange_faces_thumb.html https://gods.art/math_videos/strange_faces_thumb.html

2-3-7-43-1807 2y ago

And where are the psychedelic graphics now?

leptons 2y ago
Yeah, I did not find anything psychedelic in the article or the pages linked from it.
- mwfogleman 2y ago
  the OP's YouTube channel is filled with videos made from these techniques: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVp8HfqWX9E&list=PLL81xI9jaV3Gr2kb3VASX7maReetK2t7O&index=11 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVp8HfqWX9E&list=PLL81xI9jaV...
  - leptons 2y ago
    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".

VinLucero 2y ago

Very cool explanation between time as a variable and graphical design “aberrations”

brotchie 2y ago

If this is your kind of thing and you ever get a chance to see the musical artist Tipper alongside Fractaled Visions driving the visuals, you’re in for a treat. Most spot on visual depictions of psychedelic artifacts I’ve witnessed. Saw them together last year and it’s the no. 1 artistic experience of my life. The richness, and complexity of Fractaled Vision’s visuals are almost unbelievable. Even knowing a lot about shader programming, etc. some of the effects I was like “wtf how did he do that”. Here’s the set, doesn’t fully capture the experience, but gives a feel: Seeing this in 4k at 60fps was next level. https://youtu.be/qMcqw12-eSk?si=R5mCaIbR01w3Tbyv https://youtu.be/qMcqw12-eSk?si=R5mCaIbR01w3Tbyv

yieldcrv 2y ago
ooo I was there
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

alanbernstein 2y ago

This might have been written just for me, I love the premise. I am truly fascinated by people who attempt to reproduce the actual physiological vision effects of psychedelic drugs. Psychoactive drugs can be probes into the inner workings of our minds - in some scientific sense - and exploring the vision effects seems likely to suggest interesting things about how our visual system works. Mostly, I am just impressed when anyone is able to capture the visual experience in graphical effects, with any level of realism.

caseyohara 2y ago
> Mostly, I am just impressed when anyone is able to capture the visual experience in graphical effects, with any level of realism. I have to say that the cliche of super bright, super saturated, geometric or melty shapes like in the article are not a great reproduction of the typical visual effects of psychedelics. Apart from very high doses, the visual effects are much more subtle. The /r/replications subreddit has GIFs and short videos with a much higher degree of realism https://www.reddit.com/r/replications/top/?t=year https://www.reddit.com/r/replications/top/?t=year
helboi4 2y ago
This is 100% not what psychedelics look like. It's generally just mildly more saturated colours and the feeling that everything is possibly breathing or swaying in a more natural way. I dunno what happens if you take insane amounts tbf. I always thought that psychedelic art was a bit more about the sort of thing that is super appealing to look at while tripping.
- icameron 2y ago
  The trick is go out of body. Eyes closed and let your mind create all the visuals. Then its like being in alex grey land
  - helboi4 2y ago
    True, more interesting things happen when you close your eyes.

dghf 2y ago

> Basically any color that humans can perceive can be created from a mixture of these three colors. Many, but not any. No finite set of real primary colours can produce every perceivable colour. Some will always be out of gamut.

trollied 2y ago

This needs a link to shadertoy https://www.shadertoy.com https://www.shadertoy.com

Falimonda 2y ago
Wow! Thanks for sharing that!

AndrewStephens 2y ago

I love how easy it is to write shaders that operate on images in HTML. My skills in this area are mediocre but I love seeing how far people can take it. Even providing a simple approximation of a depth map can really make the results interesting. Some years ago I did a similar project to smoothly crossfade (with "interesting effects") between images using some of the same techniques. My writeup (and a demo): https://sheep.horse/2017/9/crossfading_photos_with_webgl_-_boston_bridge_proj.html https://sheep.horse/2017/9/crossfading_photos_with_webgl_-_b...

jasonjmcghee 2y ago

The fully interactive nature of the post is such a great way to communicate about a topic. Also it's just really clean design. Appreciate you taking the time!

cess11 2y ago

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 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KaSqrx93rS0

progmetaldev 2y ago
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.

satyarthms 2y ago

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

jerjerjer 2y ago
Is there anything which supports music input? I liked Winamp era visualizers, but the art seems to be dead today.
- satyarthms 2y ago
  Hydra actually works well with music input! It grabs audio from the mic and `a.show()` will show you the frequency bins. Then any numerical parameter can be modulated by the intensity of a bin, for example: `noise().thresh(()=>a.fft[0]*2).out()`
  - jerjerjer 2y ago
    > It grabs audio from the mic Is it possible to grab from default audio output device instead of mic? Probably not as it's browser based. I suppose mic can be faked on OS level somehow.
- progmetaldev 2y ago
  I used to spend so much time messing around with MilkDrop in Winamp. You could grab existing visualizations and see what they were doing, and make your own edits. Thanks for the nostalgia hit!
  - jerjerjer 2y ago
    MilkDrop 3 latest release was in 2023! https://github.com/milkdrop2077/MilkDrop3/releases/tag/MilkDrop3 https://github.com/milkdrop2077/MilkDrop3/releases/tag/MilkD... Thank you, that's exactly what I'm looking for.
- 2y ago

openrisk 2y ago

Fun thing: in relativity u,v are typical variable names used for a really funky coordinate transformation that mixes space and time, sometimes called Penrose coordinates [1]. So when I saw this: > uv.x = uv.x + sin(time + uv.x * 50.0) * 0.01; > uv.y = uv.y + sin(time + uv.y * 50.0) * 0.01; I thought, wow, what on Earth is going on here? But no, it turns out that its not that psychedelic. They could have used p,q or any other variable pair but its still quite interesting geometrically [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose_diagram https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose_diagram [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UV_mapping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UV_mapping

mbreese 2y ago

The next link in the series was better, IMHO. https://benpence.com/blog/post/psychedelic-graphics-1 https://benpence.com/blog/post/psychedelic-graphics-1 This gets more into how to introduce motion and new visuals instead of the building blocks. The rolling hills graphic was really interesting.

mwfogleman 2y ago

Here's a music video the OP and I made with these techniques: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GOciie5Pjk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GOciie5Pjk

JansjoFromIkea 2y ago

a bit of a tangent but I'm surprised how heavily visualisers and the like always seem to focus on packing in as much colour as possible. With OLED screens it feels like there's a ton of potential for making really great black-heavy ambient visuals that so an idle TV can become a feature of a room's decor rather than just a big black rectangle in the middle of it.

fourteenfour 2y ago
Yeah, I have an older LG and it has a disappointingly simple 4k fireworks visualization when it "sleeps" that always makes me wish I could create a custom replacement.

cancerhacker 2y ago

Early 90s, Todd Rundgren realized a Mac App called Flowfazer - it didn’t simulate your experience but was helpful as a distraction to move you along. Some people used it to provide guidance for their own creations.[2] [1] https://grokware.com/ https://grokware.com/ [2] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3Z4X4FmIhIw https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3Z4X4FmIhIw It was a time of screensavers and palette animation.

sowut 2y ago

nice

CodeWriter23 2y ago

That humanoid figure, looks like dude is getting some bad acid.

DonHopkins 2y ago

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 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 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: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39300605 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39300605 >DonHopkins 11 months ago | parent | context | favorite | on: John Walker, founder of Autodesk, has died >I really love and was deeply inspired by the great work that John Walker did with Rudy Rucker on cellular automata, starting with Autodesk's product CelLab, then James Gleick's CHAOS -- The Software, Rudy's Artificial Life Lab, John's Home Planet, then later the JavaScript version WebCA, and lots of extensive documentation and historical information on his web page. CelLab: https://www.fourmilab.ch/cellab/ https://www.fourmilab.ch/cellab/ https://www.fourmilab.ch/cellab/classic/ https://www.fourmilab.ch/cellab/classic/ https://www.fourmilab.ch/homeplanet/ https://www.fourmilab.ch/homeplanet/ https://www.rudyrucker.com/oldhomepage/cellab.htm https://www.rudyrucker.com/oldhomepage/cellab.htm [...] >josh_gordon 11 months ago | prev [–] >I'm amazed that my beloved CHAOS still runs beautifully on emulators like DOSbox. It was the last programming project where I could completely roll my own interface - and maybe my last really fun one. Here's some stuff I did that was inspired by Rudy Rucker and John Walker's work, as well as Tommaso Toffoli and Norm Margolus's wonderful book, "Cellular Automata Machines: A New Environment for Modeling": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37035627 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37035627 by DonHopkins on Aug 7, 2023 | parent | context | favorite | on: My history with Forth and stack machines (2010) >"Cellular Automata Machines: A New Environment for Modeling" is one of my favorite books of all time! It shows lots of peculiarly indented Forth code. https://donhopkins.com/home/cam-book.pdf https://donhopkins.com/home/cam-book.pdf >CAM6 Simulator Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyLMHxRNuck https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyLMHxRNuck >Forth source code for CAM-6 hardware: https://donhopkins.com/home/code/tomt-cam-forth-scr.txt https://donhopkins.com/home/code/tomt-cam-forth-scr.txt https://donhopkins.com/home/code/tomt-users-forth-scr.txt https://donhopkins.com/home/code/tomt-users-forth-scr.txt And a couple more recent videos to music using the SimCity/Micropolis tile set and WebGL tile engine to display cells: SimCity Tile Sets Space Inventory Cellular Automata Chill Resolve 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=319i7slXcbI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=319i7slXcbI I performed it in real time in response to the music (see the demo below to try it yourself), and there's a particularly vivid excursion that starts here: https://youtu.be/319i7slXcbI?t=314 https://youtu.be/319i7slXcbI?t=314 The following longer demo starts out with an homage to "Powers of 10", and is focused on SimCity, but shows how you can switch between simulators with different rules and parameters, like setting rings of fire with the heat diffusion cellular automata, then switching to the city simulator to watch it all burn as the fires spread out and leave ashes behind, then switching back to another CA rule to zap it back into another totally different pattern (you can see a trail of destruction left by not-Godzilla at 0:50 while the city simulator is running). I had to fix some bugs in the original SimCity code so it didn't crash when presented with the arbitrarily scrambled tile arrangements that the CA handed it -- think of it as fuzz testing; due to the sequential groups of 9 tiles for 3x3 zones, and the consecutive arrangements of different zone type and growth states, the smoothing heat diffusion creates all these smeared out concentric rings of zones for the city simulator to animate and simulate, like rings of water, looping animations of fire, permutations of roads and traffic density, rippling smokestacks, spinning radars, burbling fountains, an explosion animation that ends in ash, etc. Chaim Gingold's "SimCity Reverse Diagrams" visually describes the SimCity tiles, simulator, data models, etc: https://smalltalkzoo.thechm.org/users/Dan/uploads/SimCityReverseDiagrams.pdf https://smalltalkzoo.thechm.org/users/Dan/uploads/SimCityRev... Micropolis Web Space Inventory Cellular Automata Music 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBVyCpmVQew https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBVyCpmVQew You can play with it here. Click the "X" in the upper left corner to get rid of the about box, use the space bar to toggle between SimCity and Cellular Automata mode, the letters to switch between cities, + and - switch between tile sets (the original SimCity monochrome tiles are especially nice for cleansing the palette between blasts of psychedelic skittles rainbows, and the medieval theme includes an animated retro lores 8 bit pixel art knight on a horse), the digits to control the speed, and 0 toggles pause. (It's nice to slow down and watch close up, actually!): https://micropolisweb.com/ https://micropolisweb.com/ As you can see it's really fun to play with to music and cannabis, but if you're going to use any harder stuff I recommend you get used to it first and have a baby sitter with you. Actually the whole point of my working on this for decades is so that you don't need the harder stuff, and you can put it on pause when you mom calls in the middle of your trip and you have to snap back to coherency, and close the tab when you've had enough.

tylertyler 2y ago

I've been writing webgl shaders at work this week and noodling with the details to make things look like physical camera effects but occasionally I'll get something wrong and see results that look similar to the stuff in this article and I have to say it is just so much more fun than the standard image effects. Sure there might be limited use cases for it visually but playing with the models we've built up around how graphics in computers work are a great way to learn about the each one of these systems. Not just graphics but fundamental math in programming, how GPUs work and their connection to memory and CPUs, how our eyes work, how to handle animation/time, and so on.

byearthithatius 2y ago

[flagged]

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

DonHopkins 2y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33105030 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33105030 >deepnet on Oct 6, 2022 | parent | context | favorite | on: Recording the Grateful Dead: The Culture of Tapers >The overlap between early nerd culture and The Grateful Dead was very significant. >Taping and sharing culture and its benefits were very apparent in many net forums. >As were democratisation of the new tools, public terminals with BBS access and the Deadheads community spirit exemplified on Usenet and Arpanet. >Look no further than John Perry Barlow, EFF co-founder and his Manifesto of Cyberspace - he was a Grateful Dead Lyricist ! https://www.wired.com/2016/02/its-been-20-years-since-this-man-declared-cyberspace-independence https://www.wired.com/2016/02/its-been-20-years-since-this-m... >Barlow's paradigm seems cheeky without awareness of the Net's public roots, how it came up through BBS and Fidonet culture, is forgotten by those who only saw the view of the Net as a gift from the ivory towers of academia and the military rather than bedroom z80 & 6502 modem culture. q.v. Fidonet BBS documentary https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Dddbe9OuJLU https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Dddbe9OuJLU DonHopkins on Oct 6, 2022 [–] >In another comment reply to Gumby, I mentioned how I often accidentally call them "Grateful Dead Conferences", because so many tech people I knew and worked with in Silicon Valley and the Free Software community and regularly saw at computer conferences and trade shows would show up at Dead shows. >The Raster Masters would lug enormous million dollar high end SGI workstations across North Shoreline Boulevard from SGI headquarters to Shoreline Amphitheater, and actually pack them into trucks and travel on tour with the Dead, performing live improvisational psychedelic graphics on the screen behind the band in real time to their live music, using an ensemble of custom software they wrote themselves, mixing together and feeding back the video of several SGI workstations in real time. >At one concert, some hippie came up to me, pointed at the graphics on the screen behind the stage in awe, and said, "I took all these shrooms, I'm tripping my balls off, and you would not fucking believe what they're making me seeing on the screen up there!!!" I explained to him that I hadn't taken any shrooms, but I could see the exact same thing! >The Raster Masters wrote and performed their own software, which reflected the taping and sharing culture of the Dead scene, including ElectroPaint and the Panel Library from NASA, whose source code and recorded live performances were distributed with SGI's demo software and free source code library. >The improvisational software was like a musical instrument performed in real time along with the music. [...Lots more stuff with links and videos at the link:...] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33105030 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33105030

z3phyr 2y ago

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?

zipy124 2y ago
Yes, all of blender is extensible with python, and last time I used it in a project in university it was surpisingly easy to do too.
DonHopkins 2y ago
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 application specific visual programming languages. So visually programming 2d video filters, GPU shaders, 3D geometry, animations, constraints, state machines, simulations, procedural city generators, etc, and each can have their own compilation/execution model, tailored user interface, node libraries, and connection types. Geometry nodes have the visual programming language equivalent of lambdas, functions you can pass to other functions that parameterize and apply them repeatedly, iterating over 3d geometry, texture pixels, etc. Blender extensions can add nodes to the existing languages and even define their own new visual programming languages. So you can use a bunch of integrated tightly focused domain specific visual programming languages together, instead of trying to use one giant general purpose but huge incoherent "uber" language (cough cough Max/MSP/Jitter cough). https://docs.blender.org/manual/nb/2.79/render/blender_render/materials/nodes/introduction.html https://docs.blender.org/manual/nb/2.79/render/blender_rende... What are Geometry Nodes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMDB7c0ZiKA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMDB7c0ZiKA Geometry Nodes From Scratch: https://studio.blender.org/training/geometry-nodes-from-scratch/ https://studio.blender.org/training/geometry-nodes-from-scra... Free blender City Generator Addon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nLsew8I7KM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nLsew8I7KM Here's a paid product, an incredibly detailed and customizable city generator (and traffic simulator!) that shows off what you can do with Geometry Nodes, well worth the price just to play with as a video game, and learning geometry nodes: Using The City Generator 2.0 in Blender | Tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRHkGoTQKM8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRHkGoTQKM8 How to Create Procedural Buildings | Blender Geometry Nodes | Procedural City: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGgAEp-n0uk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGgAEp-n0uk

dtristram 2y ago

Hi, David Tristram here. founding member of Raster Masters, 1990's computer graphics performance ensemble. As @hopkins has mentioned, we used high end Silicon Graphics workstations to create synthetic imagery to accompany live music, including notably the Grateful Dead, Herbie Hancock, and Graham Nash. After many iterations I'm currently working mainly in 2D video processing environments, Resolume Avenue and TouchDesigner. The links here are inspiring, thanks for posting.

DonHopkins 2y ago
Who were the other people in Raster Masters, and what crazy stories from Grateful Dead concerts can you tell? ;) Every time I've ever plugged in a modern projector into a laptop at a presentation it's so stressful, like rolling the dice if the screen will ever come up. What kind of a projector and calibration and preparation did it take to project live hires SGI video onto the screen above the band?
- actionfromafar 2y ago
  I would guess either https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eidophor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eidophor or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talaria_projector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talaria_projector https://www.ebay.com/itm/225229726689 https://www.ebay.com/itm/225229726689 https://web.archive.org/web/20250124121654/https://www.ebay.com/itm/225229726689 https://web.archive.org/web/20250124121654/https://www.ebay....
  - DonHopkins 2y ago
    Wow glad I asked, thanks for the links -- TIL about wobbulators! Definitely on my xmas shopping list for my retro electronics freak friends. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talaria_projector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talaria_projector >RGB color separation and processing is obtained using vertical wobbulation of the electron beam on the oil film to modulate the green channel and sawtooth modulation is added to the horizontal sweep to separate and modulate Red and Blue channels. The optical system used in the Talaria line is a Schlieren optic like an Eidophor, but the color extraction is much more complex. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wobbulator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wobbulator >A wobbulator is an electronic device primarily used for the alignment of receiver or transmitter intermediate frequency strips. It is usually used in conjunction with an oscilloscope, to enable a visual representation of a receiver's passband to be seen, hence simplifying alignment; it was used to tune early consumer AM radios. The term "wobbulator" is a portmanteau of wobble and oscillator. A "wobbulator" (without capitalization) is a generic term for the swept-output RF oscillator described above, a frequency-modulated oscillator, also called a "sweep generator" by most professional electronics engineers and technicians.[1] A wobbulator was used in some old microwave signal generators to create what amounted to frequency modulation. It physically altered the size of the klystron cavity, therefore changing the frequency. Samwell & Hutton Ruggedized CT501 Wobbulator (1968) NSN: 6625-99-620-2403 https://www.ebay.com/itm/267012403603?_skw=wobbulator&itmmeta=01JJD1M5AHTK1468TVK5QYTSJ7&hash=item3e2b2df193:g:xG0AAOSwD2FkjRmu&itmprp=enc%3AAQAJAAAAwHoV3kP08IDx%2BKZ9MfhVJKn0K1YnrZfa2kdHsIL886YnFwpGtjuKgLqIjB9OkBLKydgnOMNf4Iyca2DR7N56hix02aXOyucw58M71MWXX%2BKbdHcI%2BfRxa83zNBn89kGAyzXjpzPC0YcyLBokFnN7LirihTQL1IWupYw8wAkwFJO6BiyXAxyJyxtywcRaGaXp%2BUBfVkz3cEtBWz6sdKR%2F4lGklFeG%2FqgMvg46hK2%2FOzCCWOxlpeqIwdsB0pM%2BI9rlHA%3D%3D%7Ctkp%3ABk9SR7DV0KGTZQ https://www.ebay.com/itm/267012403603?_skw=wobbulator&itmmet...

dtristram 2y ago

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 vector field and apply displacement to each coordinate iteratively. Even inaccurate explicit methods give good results. After the coordinates have been distorted to a far distance, the image becomes unrecognizable. A simple hack is to have a "restore" force applied to the coordinates, and they spring back to their original position, like flattening a piece of mirroring foil. Just now I am using feedback along with these displacement effects. Very small displacements applied iteratively result in motion that looks quite a bit like fluid flow.

DonHopkins 2y ago
Aaaah, remember the simple directly manipulative pleasures of Kai Power Goo: LGR: Kai's Power Goo – Classic 90s Funware for PC! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xt06OSIQ0PE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xt06OSIQ0PE
DonHopkins 2y ago
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 PostScript: https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/news-tape/fun/melt/melt.ps https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/news-tape/fun/melt/m... %! % % Date: Tue, 26 Jul 88 21:25:03 EDT % To: NeWS-makers@brillig.umd.edu % Subject: NeWS meltdown % From: eagle!icdoc!Ist!jh@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU (Jeremy Huxtable) % % I thought it was time one of these appeared as well.... % NeWS screen meltdown % % Jeremy Huxtable % % Mon Jul 25 17:36:06 BST 1988 % The procedure "melt" implements the ever-popular screen meltdown feature. /melt { 3 dict begin /c framebuffer newcanvas def framebuffer setcanvas clippath c reshapecanvas clippath pathbbox /height exch def /width exch def pop pop c /Transparent true put c /Mapped true put c setcanvas 1 1 1000 { pop random 800 mul random 600 mul random width 3 index sub mul random height 2 index sub mul 4 2 roll rectpath 0 random -5 mul copyarea pause } for framebuffer setcanvas c /Mapped false put /c null def end } def melt Here's Jeremy's original "Big Brother" eye.ps, that was the quintessential demo of round NeWS Eyeball windows: https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/news-tape/fun/eye/eye.ps.old.txt https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/news-tape/fun/eye/ey...

coffeecantcode 2y ago

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-heroic, doses. Maybe slow the waves down and lessen the range of motion a bit. Note: I am far more interested in replicating the visual hallucinations induced by psychedelic compounds than by making cool visuals for concerts and shows, utmost respect for both sets of artists though. There is an artist (and I’m sure many more) who does a fantastic job with psychedelic visuals using fully modern stacks to edit, unfortunately their account name entirely escapes me. I’ll comment below if I find it. The comparison that I would make with this portion of the Rolling Hills article would be the mushroom tea scene from Midsommar, specifically with the tree bark. The effect of objects “breathing” and flowing is such a unique visual and I love to see artists accomplishing it in different ways.

progmetaldev 2y ago
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 https://www.youtube.com/@josikinz
- coffeecantcode 2y ago
  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.

epiccoleman 2y ago

Ben - so glad I stumbled on this article. Love this kind of graphical stuff (I'm a huge sucker for psychedelia) and I really enjoyed your videos on your channel. Thanks for sharing!

rikroots 2y ago

If we're sharing, this is my effort at psychedelic graphics - animating a gradient over a live video feed (all done using a boring 2D canvas, because I don't have the brain capacity for shaders) over on CodePen: https://codepen.io/kaliedarik/pen/MWMQyJZ https://codepen.io/kaliedarik/pen/MWMQyJZ

whism 2y ago

I write semi-psychedelic paint and video mixing software for personal use. Here’s a video from last year of mixing a few things together, hopefully some here enjoy it :) https://youtu.be/IgpcJN4qAAg?si=Khq6U1nxXi-9n73A https://youtu.be/IgpcJN4qAAg?si=Khq6U1nxXi-9n73A

b4ckup 2y ago

Really interesting! I'm very much interested in pychedelic graphics. I played around with shadertoy a little bit maybe I should give it another go. For anyone interested I made some cool visuals by interpolating prompts in stable diffusion 1.5 like https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ajfMlJuDswc https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ajfMlJuDswc. I found that the older diffusion models are better for abstract graphics as it looks more "raw" and creative.

DonHopkins 2y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33071119 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33071119 DonHopkins 11 months ago | parent | context | favorite | on: John Walker, founder of Autodesk, has died Jim Crutchfield is DOCTOR CHAOS -- he's got a PhD in Complexity Science! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4Kn3djJMCE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4Kn3djJMCE Space-Time Dynamics in Video Feedback A film by Jim Crutchfield, Entropy Productions, Santa Cruz (1984). Original U-matic video transferred to digital video. 16 minutes. James P. Crutchfield. Center for Nonlinear Studies, Los Alamos National Laboratories, Los Alamos, NM 87545, USA. ABSTRACT: Video feedback provides a readily available experimental system to study complex spatial and temporal dynamics. This article outlines the use and modeling of video feedback systems. It includes a discussion of video physics and proposed two models for video feedback based on a discrete-time iterated functional equation and on a reaction-diffusion partial differential equation. Color photographs illustrate results from actual video experiments. Digital computer simulations of the models reproduce the basic spatio-temporal dynamics found in the experiments. 1. In the beginning there was feedback ... James P. Crutchfield. "Space-Time Dynamics in Video Feedback." Physica 10D 1984: 229-245. [pdf] https://csc.ucdavis.edu/~cmg/papers/Crutchfield.PhysicaD1984 https://csc.ucdavis.edu/~cmg/papers/Crutchfield.PhysicaD1984... [Plates 1-4] https://csc.ucdavis.edu/~cmg/papers/Crutchfield.PhysicaD1984.Plates1_4.jpg https://csc.ucdavis.edu/~cmg/papers/Crutchfield.PhysicaD1984... [Plates 5-7] https://csc.ucdavis.edu/~cmg/papers/Crutchfield.PhysicaD1984.Plates5_7.jpg https://csc.ucdavis.edu/~cmg/papers/Crutchfield.PhysicaD1984... https://csc.ucdavis.edu/~chaos/ https://csc.ucdavis.edu/~chaos/