Fugio Keyboard Support

I’ve been away for a couple of days running a Painting With Light video mapping workshop at Bournemouth University so today I managed to do a little Fugio coding and added a keyboard node to catch any keyboard sequence such as simply pressing R or combinations like CTRL+7 and generate a trigger.

Screenshot 2015-01-21 12.45.12

In this patch pressing R generates a new random number.

Fugio: Timeline Recording

This morning I added timeline track data recording into Fugio.

Screenshot 2015-01-15 10.50.42

For now it can record numeric values and also colours (have an idea for this) over time and then play them back. I need to add some punch in/out control and am thinking to put loop recording support in that would incorporate the functionality I was aiming for in my old app MIDILoop.

At some point I guess I need to do raw MIDI and OSC data tracks too for fine control. There now exists the possibility of recording data from one source into a timeline, outputting that through other processing stages, and re-recording it all in-app.

Screenshot 2015-01-15 10.50.48Apologies for the horrible timeline colours – was testing some stylesheet stuff… 🙂

 

Fugio: Colour to MIDI notes

I managed to get the colour timeline controls working pretty well (still some finessing to do) so I thought I’d try a little experiment and feed the Hue, Saturation, and Lightness from the colour being generated in the colour timeline to a MIDI output, creating musical notes depending on the levels. There is a grand tradition of linking colours and musical pitch (see Isaac Newton’s 1704 book Opticks) so this provides a way of playing about with this data.

Christmas Goodies

I used this Christmas as an excuse to get a few things relating to the various software tools I’m writing at the moment.

The C++ Programming Language 4th Edition by Bjarne Stroustrup replaces my well loved, dog-eared 2nd Edition that I’ve had for many years.  I haven’t felt like I’ve fully  got my head around the new language features of C++ 11 and I enjoy Bjarne’s non-nonsense description of them.  He did create C++ after all…  It’s probably not a book for the absolute beginner but it’s one that I refer to often, always picking up new tricks or refreshing some of the less used techniques.

FugioI’ve been working on my new software called Fugio (pictured above) for over a year now and I want to make it support a variety of hardware, so I got a couple of new things to try it with:

The last game controller I had was an ancient Logitech one that was quite nice until batteries kept leaking inside of it.  I upgraded to the Xbox 360 controller for Windows and wrote a node for Fugio to read all the various parameters from it.  It’s very simple to do with the Microsoft XInput API, although obviously Windows only.

While I love my original Korg nanoKontrol for MIDI control, I felt like I needed something a bit more ‘hitty’ so I plumbed for the Akai MPD18 Compact Pad Controller so I can experiment with triggering off events within Fugio.  I’ve got most of the controls mapped in using PortMidi and am just sorting out a small bug in the MIDI clock code so I’ll be able to use the note repeat controls on the MPD18 in sync with the Fugio playback.

And while not related to software development and much more related to the process of creating visuals and art, I’m very much enjoying reading Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema by the late, great film director Andrei Tarkovsky.  It’s a no-holds-barred personal rant about his views and experiences on making films and is full of inciteful comments that are giving me much food for thought.

And with that Amazon Affiliate link laiden post done, I will wish you all a very happy New Year and am looking forward to bringing you some new exciting tools in 2015.

Atmospheric Scattering Shader

Atmosheric-Scattering

Just found this rather nice Atmospheric Scattering rendering C++ code over at scratchapixel.com and thought I’d do a quick conversion to a GLSL shader as a test for the Timeline software I’m working on. Works rather nicely…

Screenshot-2014-08-20-11.25

My (none optimised) fragment shader conversion is:

#version 150

#define M_PI 3.1415926535897932384626433832795

uniform float TimeOfDay; // range 0.0 -> 1.0 (0.0 = Midnight, 0.5 = Midday, etc)

const float RADIUS_EARTH = 6360e3;
const float RADIUS_ATMOSPHERE = 6420e3;
const float RAYLEIGH_SCALE_HEIGHT = 7994;
const float MIE_SCALE_HEIGHT = 1200;
const float SUN_INTENSITY = 20;

const float g = 0.76;

const vec3 betaR = vec3( 5.5e-6, 13.0e-6, 22.4e-6 );    // Rayleigh scattering coefficients at sea level
const vec3 betaM = vec3( 21e-6 );                       // Mie scattering coefficients at sea level

vec3 sunDirection = vec3( 0, 1, 0 );

const int numSamples = 16;
const int numSamplesLight = 8;

struct Ray
{
    vec3 o; //origin
    vec3 d; //direction (should always be normalized)
};

struct Sphere
{
    vec3 pos;   //center of sphere position
    float rad;  //radius
};

const Sphere SPHERE_EARTH      = Sphere( vec3( 0 ), RADIUS_EARTH );
const Sphere SPHERE_ATMOSPHERE = Sphere( vec3( 0 ), RADIUS_ATMOSPHERE );

bool intersect( in Ray ray, in Sphere sphere, out float t0, out float t1 )
{
    vec3 oc = ray.o - sphere.pos;
    float b = 2.0 * dot(ray.d, oc);
    float c = dot(oc, oc) - sphere.rad*sphere.rad;
    float disc = b * b - 4.0 * c;

    if (disc < 0.0)
        return false;

   float q;
    if (b < 0.0)         q = (-b - sqrt(disc))/2.0;     else         q = (-b + sqrt(disc))/2.0;       t0 = q;     t1 = c / q;     // make sure t0 is smaller than t1     if (t0 > t1) {
        // if t0 is bigger than t1 swap them around
        float temp = t0;
        t0 = t1;
        t1 = temp;
    }

    // if t1 is less than zero, the object is in the ray's negative direction
    // and consequently the ray misses the sphere
    if (t1 < 0.0)
        return false;

    if( t0 < 0.0 )
    {
        t0 = 0;
    }

    return( true );
}

vec3 computeIncidentLight( in Ray r )
{
    float       t0, t1;

    if( !intersect( r, SPHERE_ATMOSPHERE, t0, t1 ) )
    {
        return vec3( 1 );
    }

    float segmentLength = ( t1 - t0 ) / numSamples;
    float tCurrent = t0;

    vec3 sumR = vec3( 0 );
    vec3 sumM = vec3( 0 );

    float opticalDepthR = 0;
    float opticalDepthM = 0;

    float mu = dot( r.d, sunDirection );
    float phaseR = 3 / ( 16 * M_PI ) * ( 1 + mu * mu );
    float phaseM = 3 / (  8 * M_PI ) * ( ( 1 - g * g ) * ( 1 + mu * mu ) ) / ( ( 2 + g * g ) * pow( 1 + g * g - 2 * g * mu, 1.5 ) );

    for( int i = 0; i < numSamples ; i++ )
    {
        vec3    samplePosition = r.o + r.d * ( tCurrent + 0.5 * segmentLength );
        float   height = length( samplePosition ) - RADIUS_EARTH;

        // compute optical depth for light

        float hr = exp( -height / RAYLEIGH_SCALE_HEIGHT ) * segmentLength;
        float hm = exp( -height / MIE_SCALE_HEIGHT      ) * segmentLength;

        opticalDepthR += hr;
        opticalDepthM += hm;

        // light optical depth

        Ray lightRay = Ray( samplePosition, sunDirection );

        float lmin, lmax;

        intersect( lightRay, SPHERE_ATMOSPHERE, lmin, lmax );

        float segmentLengthLight = lmax / numSamplesLight;
        float tCurrentLight = 0;
        float opticalDepthLightR = 0;
        float opticalDepthLightM = 0;
        
        int j = 0;

        for( ; j < numSamplesLight ; j++ )
        {
            vec3 samplePositionLight = lightRay.o + lightRay.d * ( tCurrentLight + 0.5 * segmentLengthLight );

            float heightLight = length( samplePositionLight ) - RADIUS_EARTH;

            if( heightLight < 0 )
            {
                break;
            }

            opticalDepthLightR += exp( -heightLight / RAYLEIGH_SCALE_HEIGHT ) * segmentLengthLight;
            opticalDepthLightM += exp( -heightLight / MIE_SCALE_HEIGHT      ) * segmentLengthLight;

            tCurrentLight += segmentLengthLight;
        }

        if( j == numSamplesLight )
        {
            vec3 tau = betaR * ( opticalDepthR + opticalDepthLightR ) + betaM * 1.1 * ( opticalDepthM + opticalDepthLightM );
            vec3 attenuation = exp( -tau );

            sumR += hr * attenuation;
            sumM += hm * attenuation;
        }

        tCurrent += segmentLength;
    }

    return( SUN_INTENSITY * ( sumR * phaseR * betaR + sumM * phaseM * betaM ) );
}

void main()
{
    const int width = 512;
    const int height = 512;

    float a = mod( TimeOfDay - 0.5, 1 ) * 2.0 * M_PI;

    sunDirection = normalize( vec3( 0, cos( a ), sin( a ) ) );

    float x = 2 * ( gl_FragCoord.x + 0.5 ) / ( width  - 1 ) - 1;
    float y = 2 * ( gl_FragCoord.y + 0.5 ) / ( height - 1 ) - 1;

    float z2 = x * x + y * y; 

    if( z2 <= 1 )
    {
        float phi   = atan( y, x );
        float theta = acos( 1 - z2 );

        vec3 dir = vec3( sin( theta ) * cos( phi ), cos( theta ), sin( theta ) * sin( phi ) );
        vec3 pos = vec3( 0, RADIUS_EARTH + 1, 0 );

        gl_FragColor = vec4( computeIncidentLight( Ray( pos, normalize( dir ) ) ), 1 );
    }
    else
    {
        gl_FragColor = vec4( 0 );
    }
}

Timeline Development – 3rd August 2014

Screenshot-2014-08-03-12.13.08It’s been a while since my last update, though not from lack of action, rather I’ve been struggling with my latest project for a the past few months and I felt it’s time to pull back the curtain a bit and show what I’ve been working on.

My original design for the Timeline software was a nice open-ended sequencer that could manipulate all manner of types of data from single values (for MIDI or OSC control of parameters) to colours, audio, and even video, combined with a flexible (possibly too flexible) control over how each track played back with repeating sections and random markers, and all manner of tricks that I was getting really excited about using.

I’d spent almost a year working on it and had a pretty nice media playback engine, and everything seemed to be heading towards a 1.0 release back in June 2014 but then I hit a wall, which I have to say is pretty rare for me in my software development experience as I’ve always had a clear idea about what the role and function of each system I’m developing has been.

The problem was the growing complexity of visually managing the relationship between the different tracks of data and how these related to other applications and devices through the various input and output interfaces.  I was also toying with the idea of being able to apply real-time effects to video and audio (also data) and these did not comfortably fit into the design I had come up with.

I’ve also slowly been working on another application called PatchBox that uses a node based interface to visually build connections between blocks of functionality, so I took a deep breath and ripped the code apart and put in a new interface:

Screenshot-2014-06-25-21.49.30The node interface went some way towards solving the problem of presenting the relationship between tracks and devices, but there was a major problem, in that the core code for the node system (it’s actually the code that drives several of my art installations such as Shadows of Light) was rather incompatible with the core code of the Timeline application, and a hard decision had to be made:

  1. Release Timeline and PatchBox separately and fix the interface issue over time.
  2. Combine the two applications, which would require taking a massive step back equivalent to months of development time.

Not an easy one to make, compounded by the fact that as a freelance artist, until I get a product on sale, I’m basically paying for all the development time out of my own pocket so the latter option was not to be taken lightly.

After a couple of weeks of chin stroking, frantic diagrams scratched in notebooks, thinking about what configuration would be most commercially viable, and false starts, I came to a final thought:

“Make the tool that you need for your art”

It’s not that I don’t want it to be a useful tool that other people will want to use and buy at some point (that would be lovely) but I’m not a software design company, and this is primarily an “art platform” for my own work so I have to listen to what feels right to me.

So, I chose the latter (of course) and I’ve been working on it at least a few hours a day, pretty much every day for the past few months.  The screenshot at the top of this post is the latest showing a colour timeline track feeding into an OpenGL shader.

There is still much to be done and it’s pretty gruelling at times as I’m having to go over old ground repeatedly, but I feel like it’s heading in the right direction, and I’m already creating new artworks using it that wouldn’t have previously been possible.

Realistically a 1.0 release isn’t now going to happen until 2015, though with a long solo project like this it is easy to find yourself on the long slide into a quiet madness of complexity and introspection so I’m planning more regular updates to at least keep my progress in check by “real people”.  To this end, if you have any comments, questions, or general messages of encouragement, I’d be happy to hear them.

 

 

Timeline Update

Timeline.2014-02-17I managed to spend a few hours working on my OSC and MIDI sequencer project today and completely rewrote the audio side of it.

It now uses FFMPEG to load audio and PortAudio for playback.

I’m slowly developing the interface into something usable, though the design is pretty simplistic right now.

At some point I’ll get around to doing a release for Windows, OSX, and Linux – probably to coincide with the developing MIDI and OSC support in Painting With Light.

AudioBox Crowdfunding

AudioBoxBabyI’m doing my first crowd-funding campaign to develop a new version of my real-time, audio analysis and tempo detection software tool AudioBox.

Click here to see the campaign.

I’ve not released a new version of it since 2009, but I think it’s about time it had a refresh, and made an appearance on Linux and Apple OSX too.