As I prepare for my new job which starts on January 4th, I’m taking some time to learn Derivative’s TouchDesigner. It’s a realtime procedural 3D / compositing tool. Well, it’s actually so much more than that, but it’s very difficult to describe.

Anyway, I’m trying to learn it. And I’ve found the best way to learn stuff (for me) is to take something I’ve already made and try to recreate it in the new environment. So, that’s what I’ve started doing here. I’m not sure how much further I want to go with this, but it’s nice to know that I could pull this much together after about an hour’s worth of work.

This software is terribly powerful, and more and more documentation / improvements / tutorial videos are being added all the time. It’s making me very excited about 2010.

+ View the piece on Flickr.

+ View the piece on Flickr.

+ View the piece on Flickr.

Some progress has occurred. C++ is becoming clearer. Here’s what progressed in the first couple images:

1. I created a Tween class for animating values. It’s modeled after CASA Lib’s Tween class. I’ll probably be releasing it to the community soon.
2. I hooked up my MIDI controllers to the piece, so I could have more control over tweaking values. I’m using a great add-on for openFrameworks called ofxMIDI.
3. Along the way, I learned how to implement openFrameworks event dispatchers and listeners. (Hint: search for “poco events” in the openFrameworks Wiki if you want to learn how.)

In doing all this, I was able to trigger light movements with a MIDI controller. I used my M-Audio Trigger Finger’s velocity-sensitive pads to animate two lights. Hard tap = fast movement.

+ View hi-res on Flickr.

Here’s a video of the animated lights in action. Please excuse the stutters; while this does run at 30fps in realtime, SnapzPro isn’t able to keep up because of the CPU usage of the piece.

Now after all this, I came to realize that I really wanted to be able to loop the Perlin noise that was creating the height map of the tube. Because, though you can’t see it, there’s an awful seam on the side facing away from the camera. By looping the noise, I could reliably look at it from all angles.

After some research, I came across a great library called libnoise. Took me a little while to get it to compile, only to realize that while it did the job, it dropped my framerate from a respectable 45fps to 9fps. Definitely not suitable for realtime noise generation.

So I went back to the fastest Perlin noise generator I could find (this class from John Ratcliff), and I decided to live with the seam in the back.

Amidst all this, I also stumbled upon this awesome blog post about Twisted Architecture. I thought it would be cool to implement something like that in my piece. So I did. But then I forgot about it.

It was only when I started twisting the “twist-associated” knob on my MIDI controller that the damn seam actually came to life. So, you can see how it starts to play out in the rest of the images here:

+ View hi-res on Flickr.

+ View hi-res on Flickr.

+ View hi-res on Flickr.

+ View hi-res on Flickr.

Also, in those last couple renders, I added a convex mesh to the background so that I could start incorporating background colors properly. Moreover, so I could get some light-generated gradients happening. More to come… more to come.

+ View higher res image.

For those of you following me on Twitter today, you witnessed the pain I endured under the cruel, icy grip of OpenGL.

That pain: learning how to compute vertex normals.

But eight hours later, I managed to pull it off with the help of the OpenGL SuperBible, this thread, and this article. Oh, and this amidst porting it to C++ (openFrameworks) for maximum control and speed.

Along the way, I learned how OpenGL lighting works. I was having such a hard time with it before because my form didn’t have its surface normals nor its vertex normals correctly calculated. So light wasn’t bouncing off it the way I expected. Now it’s all making good sense.

My next steps will be adding interactivity. I’m going to try to use my HP TouchSmart for touch input along with its webcam for vision input. Separately, I’ll try to make some sort of music visualizer out of this — or at least make it audio-responsive.

Check out a video from today:

I’m continuing the Perlin noise saga. The last thing I did was port the Noise Column project over to Processing and openFrameworks.

This time I wanted to add some actual volume — not just perceived volume — to the form. These are just some initial tests that you see above. I’ve got a ton to learn about lighting and optimization and matrix transformations. Robert says I need to use “per-vertex normals”. I say “OKAY!” Hopefully I can start adding some of these things over the next couple weeks and really use this project as a general learning tool.

For now, I’m developing all this in Processing using the PGraphicsOpenGL renderer. I’m not using any actual OpenGL calls directly; I’m only using the Processing API. One little discovery I made yesterday: PeasyCam turns out to be a really sweet little camera library for Processing. Adds mouse control over the camera with a single line of code.

The ultimate goal of this is to create two different pieces. One will be a rendered motion piece. It probably won’t have any audio and will function as an ambient looping video. It will be submitted to this call for entries: Flow Interrupted.

The second piece would actually be interactive. I’m going to toy around with camera, audio, and touch as discreet inputs (all separately). This will give me a chance to play with the new HP TouchSmart PC I got. So you could consider the second execution to be more of an interactive installation piece. And that’s going to be submitted to this call for entries: FLUID Interactive Digital Art.

Check out some of the stills:

+ View larger Image.

+ View larger Image.

+ View larger Image.

+ View larger Image.