My complete collection

[Nitorami]

Just one preset after quite a long break...

[Cope]

Very cool, I like the different effects you can get by changing a few values in the shaders.

I'm curious though, how do you come up with shader code like this? Random experiments? It seems like some of it is tweaked just right, and those tweaks are the difference between a nice effect and something that looks like nothing.

[Nitorami]

Well observed, I spent quite a few hours on fine tuning. This is more or less try and error but with a certain systematic in it.
Normally the warp shader is the critical one and easily blurs to white or fades to black. Once I have found a nice combination of shaders, I disable the comp shader and try various parameters on the warp shader. It's just easier to see the effect without the comp shader getting in the way. Then turn the comp shader on and see what can be done here.

The movement and zoom effects are largely down to the comp shader, and adjusting these parameters also takes a lot of time. I find it difficult to get these right. Once it looks fine, I try different music and suddenly it appears to be too wild and shaky, or too slow and predictable... so readjust the parameters or control them in an altogether different way... while of course one preset will never fit all music styles.

I want my presets to be reasonably non repetitive, so I use a number of parameters which are either not synchronised such as sin (k1*t), sin (k2*t) etc., or are clocked by the beat in a pattern that will not repeat quickly, such as my vars q27 and q28, where q27 is incremented by the beat and q28 is incremented when q27 goes through 16 or similar. I used this excessively, in the predecessor of infinity, ludicrous speed, which will virtually never repeat.

Tweaking never ends, and often you will have new ideas for the warp shader (which has just been finished), for instance by changing the global zoom variable. This is critical because not all previously tried and tested parameter combinations may go well with this new variable, and e.g. under certain circumstances cause white screen.

Just got another idea to maky infinity more interesting, simply insert factor q5 in the middle of the comp shader, so it reads float dist = frac(-q9+1.0*n/anz*q5);

[Flexi]

hey martin i know very well what you mean.
Nice preset again! (as usual )
usually i begin with the warp shader and then go for the composition part. When I'm going to the comp shader i mostly only do minor edits to the warp. This may also come because you can't do really complex stuff with 64 operations. But this year of being limited to 64 operations was too cool to learn some efficient code tricks. I saw most of your work for the first time just a few days ago and they are all so inspiring. The butterflies are just ! I also neglected all the state driven stuff like different modes to change on beats but focused on fluid, naturally flowing and mostly analog control loops.
but then again there are not very much variables for so complex dynamic systems. the most simple particle in 2D uses 4 variables. And in every one of them i see a dimension. Basically Milkdrop is capable of visualizing a ~30D space. normally we say we're familiar to 2D or 3D, but there are also those hidden ones which represent relationships between objects. that's what i am interested in.

but what am i saying - what would the world be without multiplexer?
Order to the chaos - et voila: Infinity. (and vice versa. Hail Eris!)
*very strange worlds on my mind now* (in a positive manner)

exploring Hilbert space = lerp'ing between different linear and nonlinear spaces.
Martin, you did some impressive 3D tilts on planes.
And I showed how to do logarithmic spirals and Möbius transformations.
Now that i have the complexity too i guess it's time to build some conjunctions between them.
But uh, i guess i talk too much again

... remember my words, i'll be back!

[Cope]

Well the hard work definitely shows Sometimes I seem to hit a road block in a preset, but a few days later I'll pick it up again and have it looking pretty decent after all. The neat thing about tweaking is that it can turn a single effect into dozens of presets that all look very different.

I'm off for a week or so for christmas holidays. So merry christmas everyone

[Phat]

Check this out...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milkdrop

[Saint Goody]

Originally posted by Phat
Check this out...



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milkdrop

uhh... what about it?

That infinity preset is absolutely kickass by the way.

[Flexi]

[Saint Goody]

edit: sonofabitch...

[Nitorami]

One more

[Flexi]

one more remix

i just had to try that and it's cool. the 3D effect is gone, but it gives a nice mosaic as i find.

edit: Martin recommended a minor color enhancement to the file, it's a bit more shiny now

[Cope]

the layered effect is very cool, like an acid trip

you guys both need to write some tutorials explaining the theory behind presets like these, because when I look at them I'm in awe, but when I look at the shader code the awe turns to an unclamped variable awe+confusion which seems to increase linearly to infinity

[Nitorami]

Well, I would do this if I weren't so lazy after a day in the office... Hope I'll psyche myself up sooner or later. However feel free to ask a specific question - would be easier for me to answer than a global "how does this all work" ?

There is not much of a theory, just a few basic transformations which are fairly easy to understand.

[Nitorami]

here we go

[Flexi]

atmospheric - i love the sky.

here, i donate you my first association: Moby - we are all made of stars