Syntopia

Impressive Processing animations made by Glenn Marshall:

Metamorphosis at Vimeo

Music is Math at Vimeo

In order to see these at the best quality, go to Full Screen in the Vimeo player, make sure HD is on, and that Scaling is off.

Once again I’m extremely impressed by what shows up on the demoscene.

Inigo Quilez managed to create the following picture within a 4KB executable. In fact he managed to fit a renderer and the generative code for both the scene and the textures in only 3900 bytes.

More info (and executables) here.

The Demo Scene never cease to amaze me. The technical quality of these demos is amazing - complex 3D scenes rendered real-time, procedural textures, real-time sound synthesis, and incredible low foot-prints.

Recently I stumbled upon demoscene.tv which features recorded videos (flash video) of many of the best demos. Of course part of the fun is actually running these demos, to be amazed that they are indeed real-time, but sadly my laptop is not geared towards neither CPU or GPU intensive activities.

A few selected demos:

fr-041: debris by Farbrausch

Lifeforce by andromeda software development

The winners of the Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest 2007 proves that fractal art actually has evolved since the eighties.

View the rest of the winners…

Crayon Physics allows you to draw objects using the mouse and let them interact with each other (by rigid body physics).

As of now Crayon Physics can be tested as a downloadable prototype, but a more complex version is under development.

Update: Marker World is a similar themed game, strongly inspired by Crayon Physics.

Jared Tarbell’s Complexification.net offers plenty of beautiful Processing-based art - most can be run directly from Java applets and have source code included.

Kindernoiser (yep, weird name) is a a 4096 byte demo of 3D julia sets. For comparison the HTML for this page is close to 30 KB.

If you do not have a powerful graphics card, try the video linked to below.

KinderNoiser

By coincidence I came across Jeff Minter’s company Llamasoft and surprisingly discovered that it was still going strong.

Jeff Minter, probably most famous for his somewhat… surreal C64 games (”Attack of the Mutant Camels”, “Revenge of the Mutant Camels” and even “Metagalactic Llamas Battle at the Edge of Time”), apparently has been hacking away on light synthesizers for the past twenty years.

His light synthesizers are complex visualization modules either music-controlled or driven by human interaction. And his latest incarnation, Neon, is actually used in the Xbox 360’s dashboard.

Who would have guessed that Llamasoft code would end up in the Xbox 360 firmware?

Well, I started worked on a spare time project, called Structure Synth: a small application for generative structure synthesis (in 3D). The app itself will be built around an embedded editor with a OpenGL visualization window next to it. Here is a mock-up shot:

The structures are designed in a simple language, EisenScript (named after the Great Russian director, Sergei Eistenstein, of course). It will be similar, but not identical, to the Context Free Design Grammer that Context Free uses.

An EisenScript defines a Rule Set, where each rule is defined as a number of Actions.

An Action would typically be to perform a Transformation and either call another rule, or one of the built-in drawing primitives. As in Context Free rules can be defined recursively in terms of themselves.

Rules are allowed to be ambiguous: more than one definition for a rule can exist, and when ambiguous rules are encountered the Builder will choose one at random. Again, as in Context Free, it will also be possible to specify a weighting for each of the rule definitions.

Here is an example of how an EisenScript rule set might look:

Structure Synth will be built in C++/Qt4.3/OpenGL and will be Open Source (GPL). It should be cross-platform (Windows, Linux, and Mac).

I’ve started a subversion repository here (Google Code Hosting), but will probably move to SourceForge.

The Syntopia logo above was created by my first script in Context Free, a program I can highly recommend. It is a bit like Logo (does anyone remember this?) on steroids.

However, I’ve been thinking of ways of extending Context Free into 3D, and will start posting some of my design sketches for Structure Synth - an IDE/Language for creating generative art (like Context Free).

I plan to write it in C++/Qt4.3/OpenGL and it should be runnable on Windows/Mac/Linux.

For an example of a Context Free script, the syntax for the above picture can be downloaded here: circles.cfdg.

The syntax for Structure Synth will be quite similar to CFDG-script but with a few twists: like the ability to ‘retire’ rules after a certain number of either recursions or iterations, and the option to change (rendering) settings when a rule is executed. Naturally the ’state’ operators (like rotations and deformations) also need to be adapted to a 3D world.

There will be an integrated OpenGL viewer, and I plan to add PovRay support for creating high-quality views of the 3D-models.

More details will follow in the next weeks.