8 ms·
Show HN: Psychedelic animation generator; (p)art of your next trip
Sharing an open source project for creating psychadelic art -- using liquid motion, distorted shapes, shadows and light. This tool works in real-time in the browser using webgl shaders.
This project was inspired by drum & bass / acid techno music, and 90s rave posters.
Use this to create art for a music video, concert posters, stylized animations in creative projects, or simply to enjoy alongside some fine music.
Use the detailed control menu (top-right) to set a custom canvas size, adjust animation speed, control pattern and colours, etc...
You can export your creation as an image or video afterwards.
How this works: this tool uses WebGL shaders to create a real-time animation (with a trippy liquid / shadow / blur aesthetic).
The animation is created using a random seed position and mixes in random noise (fractal brownian motion, 3D simplex noise), so each time you re-run it you're creating a unique piece of art.
Github repo: https://github.com/collidingScopes/liquid-shape-distortions https://github.com/collidingScopes/liquid-shape-distortions
-----
I hope you enjoy the visuals. I'd love to hear any feedback or suggestions.
- nimzoLarsen 2y agoThis is so beautiful! The outputs are trippy and the music fits well. Nice work
- Distilitron 2y agoTelefon tel aviv is nice, gfx is crap
- evanjrowley 2y agoIMO the most realistic generated psychedelic images were made by Google's Deep Dream 10 years ago. It seems like it's been mostly forgotten about after the advent of DALL-E, Midjourney, etc.
- yojo 2y agoAgreed, it made some seriously wild stuff. Assuming you’re talking about this: https://research.google/blog/inceptionism-going-deeper-into-neural-networks/?m=1 https://research.google/blog/inceptionism-going-deeper-into-... Here’s an example I generated in 2015: https://www.wandereurope.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/dreamscoped_bean2.jpeg https://www.wandereurope.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/drea... Source image: https://www.wandereurope.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/marseille_museum_bean.jpg https://www.wandereurope.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/mars...
- mock-possum 2y agoEh a lot of that ‘deep dreamy’ stuff ends up looking so same-same - I don’t need to look at endless various of ‘dog faces and insect body parts and glittering gemstones’ you know? I want to see actual weird stuff, bizarre genometry, a sense of space that’s mind-bending. Maximalism is not the be all end all of trippy visuals.
- duskwuff 2y agoI believe this music video (Röyksopp - Impossible) was created with something along those lines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljnxZypkjn0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljnxZypkjn0
- brokenmachine 2y agoCheck this one out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGuBpKqtHdY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGuBpKqtHdY And this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dd3ZQOzyquo&t=385s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dd3ZQOzyquo&t=385s The AI generated ones are getting really good nowadays.
- DrSiemer 2y agoDeforum stuff is cool, but also a bit of a flash in the pan because of the disconnected nature of the generated frames. Pure video generation is getting better, but like all generative AI it lacks imagination and cannot really create new things, making it less qualified for truly mindblowing psychedelic visuals in its current state.
- jstanley 2y agoIt would be cool to have something like the first one, except generated in realtime and you get to "steer". If it works by zooming in slightly each frame and then asking the AI to refine the image to better match the prompt or whatever, we could steer through the world by changing the centre of zoom. If generating frames is fast enough it could feel like flying a spaceship through a psychedelic environment.
- 2y ago
- bongodongobob 2y agoEh, it's close but misses the mark if we're specifically trying to match psychedelic visuals. If it were more fractally and geometric sure, but the dogs and fish and shit just isn't it. This is pretty bang on for a high dose - https://www.instagram.com/share/reel/BALFNVBS20 https://www.instagram.com/share/reel/BALFNVBS20 Or this: https://www.instagram.com/share/reel/BBumGiQdP6 https://www.instagram.com/share/reel/BBumGiQdP6
- N2yhWNXQN3k9 2y agoSeems closer to representing the experience, but probably less interesting for enhancing the experience.
- muzani 2y agoI kind of miss the early AI days, where the AI felt closer to my subconscious than me.
- ddmf 2y agomade me wonder if the brain works in a similar way converting the incoming eye information into what the brain "sees" - it's just pattern matching based on what has been seen before and showing the best fit - psychadelics disrupt that.
- DrSiemer 2y agoAny way to lerp transitions like Milkdrop does?
- getToTheChopin 2y agoNot right now unfortunately, but I'll try to add this
- talles 2y agoI miss Winamp
- DrSiemer 2y agoIt will never as glorious as it was back in the day, but Milkdrop 3 was released in 2023 and works on any audio on your system.
- 01100011 2y agoIs it cross platform? Best thing about milkdrop was that you could use a microphone. We brought a projector and screen to a music festival (HSMF) in '04 and had a jam circle in our camp where the visualizations would respond to the music we were making. Definitely a hit way back when before that sort of stuff became boring.
- ferociouskite56 2y agoOn Android the free ProjectM app hasn't been updated since 2022. Does anyone know how to install Milkdrop 3 on Kodi for Raspberry Pi or in F-Droid? Kodi is also on Android.
- rtuin 2y agoThis reminds me of Winamp too. As a teenager I used to fiddle with the visualization editor for hours. Good fun!
- protocolture 2y agoSo many llama's with unwhipped asses.
- Y_Y 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wesley_Willis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wesley_Willis Such a cool and influential musician.
- andyjohnson0 2y agoThis is really nicely done. Kudos.
- adzm 2y agoI really do appreciate the 90s, Video Toaster-esque[1] aesthetics [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Toaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Toaster
- sixstring982 2y agoVery nice! Reminds me of something I built on Shadertoy a while back: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4ttGRf https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4ttGRf
- OracB7 2y agoNice! Where does one learn how to do this kind of thing (aside from the fractals)?
- WASDx 2y agohttps://iquilezles.org/ https://iquilezles.org/ is a legend, see the articles and video tutorials. Aside from shadertoy I use https://glslsandbox.com/ https://glslsandbox.com/ (for some reason it has https errors now). It's the same concept and it has a lot of submissions that are more basic than shardertoy where you can easily change lines and see what happens. My intuition for these kind of shaders: They are just pure functions mapping an x,y coordinate to a color (optionally making use of time and cursor position). From this you can derive anything, like drawing a circle by choosing black or white depending on the distance from the center. There is a lot of intuition to gain and it's fun playing around, because as long as it compiles you will see something and you are likely to be surprised about what you accidentally made. Very rewarding.
- deadbabe 2y agothis gave me an overwhelming sense of melancholy
- bowsamic 2y agoWhy?
- bomewish 2y agoPresumably nostalgia —- I’m certainly feeling it!
- deadbabe 2y agoThe pattern and music I got felt like waking up on a groggy Saturday morning, as a very young child in the 90s, with not a care in the world and in a world where things were generally going pretty good. Any moment you expect your youthful mom to call you down for breakfast, to eat colorful cereal with siblings and watch bright funny cartoons, before going outside to act out adventures in the yard, and wow it feels like so much time goes by but then it’s just 10 AM, the day seems to take forever.
- locusofself 2y agoThe music is Telefon Tel Aviv , first track from their first album, Fahrenheit Fair Enough. Absolute masterpiece of electronic music.
- madmonk 2y agoThank you for reminding me about Telefon Tel Aviv.
- j_san 2y agoIs there a way to make it loop? (So that one only needs to record e.g. 20 seconds, after which it loops to save space)
- getToTheChopin 2y agoYou can't do a loop right now, but I'll try to add that. Would be very cool
- dole 2y agobeen tumbling down the old Cthugha and Milkdrop visualization rabbit hole recently, nice gfx and aesthetics on yours and it's always nice to see a fresh take on code
- grahamj 2y agoah this takes me back. Thanks ;)
- qwertox 2y agoI think AI tools like Stable Diffusion have a big potential. Something along the lines of what Nexxus 604 is doing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6m3OvB819s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6m3OvB819s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6s_Dtl1U9wU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6s_Dtl1U9wU
- spot 2y agocouldn't agree more :) he is not alone :)
- CamperBob2 2y agoThat is freaking awesome. Why isn't it better known?
- brcmthrowaway 2y agoDo not take drugs! its bad for you
- lscdjlsdkf 2y agothis is not true. Drugs can help
- newman8r 2y agoSo cool! Would love to be able to easily make it full screen (maybe I'm missing the button for that) Bookmarked
- getToTheChopin 2y agoThank you! Right now you can open the controls at the top-right and then adjust the width / height of the canvas. I'll try to make it easier with a single click
- w_for_wumbo 2y agoI love these projects, I've been really passionate about including our own sensory inputs into the experience, whether it's voice, webcam input or (in the future health metrics) in order to tailor the experience to the experiencers' desires.
- dalemhurley 2y agoI love it, it would be awesome if the controls could slowly and randomly adjust themselves so over time the images transition.
- mgraczyk 2y agoVery cool animations, but they don't strike me as "psychedelic". A bit too smooth and unstructured.
- evo_9 2y agoVery similar to my favorite trip toy of the 90s… rock ‘star’ Todd Rundgren’s Flowfazer. Quite mesmerizing for toddlers, too. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/flowfazer/id507935335 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/flowfazer/id507935335
- typeofhuman 2y agoCool. But this literally crashed my phone. I've never seen anything like it. Was impressed really. Little nervous. But it locked my Brave browser first then it locked my entire phone. System UI and Android crashed. It recovered but wow. What a trip.
- newobj 2y agoI've heard this music somewhere before.... Telefon Tel Aviv I think? why isn't it credited?
- garbagewoman 2y agoLooks to be a demo of the repo, the visualisation along with “Telefon Tel Aviv” isn’t the product - in that light it probably isn’t credited due to a minor oversight
- locusofself 2y agosuch an amazing track though, I use this to test every new speaker / headphones I've had for like 20 years running.
- getToTheChopin 2y agoSorry about that -- yes it was an oversight on my part. I had included this small credit in the commentary on the website: "The song used is Fahrenheit Fair Enough by Telefon Tel Aviv." This isn't enough -- I've pushed a changed showing a song credit at the bottom-left of the canvas that appears when you first load the page. I also added a song credit in the github readme. Telefon Tel Aviv is one of my favourite bands, I hope they get more listeners!
- int_19h 2y agoLong-running fractal zooms are really good for this purpose, e.g.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cgp2WNNKmQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cgp2WNNKmQ
- nosmokewhereiam 2y ago"...90's techno / Rave Posters..." This project speaks to me, thank you thank you thank you!
- taopai 2y agoI recall experiencing an incredibly fast hallucination with my eyes closed—like tiny dots moving at an extreme speed. Faster than anything I had ever seen, almost like an intense vibration, beyond the refresh rate of the eye. It was both intimidating and exhilarating. Perhaps screens are unable to replicate this type of hallucination. The animations on this website are impressive. However, in my experience, closed-eye visuals tend to have a central focal point, along with folding or tunnel-like movements and recurring patterns. I feel deeply grateful for having had some psychedelic experiences, even though hallucinations are the least interesting aspect of them. For me, they acted as a magnifying glass for my overall state of being—allowing me to step outside myself and honestly assess how I feel. They also foster a deeper appreciation for nature. It would be fascinating to have this discussion within this community. These substances are often demonized due to a lack of understanding, yet they can have a profound impact. For instance, after taking a small dose of LSD, I completely lost interest in alcohol. In the past six months, I’ve only had three nights of drinking, lost a significant amount of weight, and feel fantastic.
- lscdjlsdkf 2y agoPersonally, i don't like them at all. This grainy feel with a lot of dark/black colors etc. i would not use this while tripping.
- lscdjlsdkf 2y agoWhy does a personal opinion gets downvoted? I would not use this visualization when i trip. If the OP is interested in a more indepth i would provide it but otherwise, its a product which is directly correlated to a personal experience.