V // Pixelnerve » Generative

Aliasing Beauty

victormartins — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 18:25:29 +0000

Finally, i posted about the Aliasing Beauty, a relative to Black&White project created for Written Images book. Read more..

Float

victormartins — Thu, 06 May 2010 17:30:31 +0000

I have recently released at inércia Demoparty, a gift i made for Sue. It started as a christmas gift that would express myself and ofcourse keep me from following everybody else to the local shop and spend my money on something made by others.

There is no executable this time, as i don’t know if i can spread the music, still, nobody can stop me (for the moment) from giving you a video. So here it is, Float.

Mass cube rendering

victormartins — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 12:02:01 +0000

I have recently done some experimental work in order to render mass amounts of cubes. I was moved by this video from Smash, i wanted to know how far i would be able to go on my NVidia GT240M (rendering side). My first choice was Geometry Shaders.
I quickly wrote an app that sent a list of points in space to the GPU and a geometry shader would generate a cube mesh for each one of the points. Tested it on 100.000 cubes and the framerate was bad(10fps or so). The time was now for optimization.

Next step was to optimize the cube generation by lowering from a 24 vertex cube to 14 vertex triangle strip. Things got better, but nothing close to my expectations. I was not satisfied, i mean, i had alot of cubes on screen (100K which was not that much) and that was it, nothing else. We’re talking about 20fps or so, for 100.000 cubes (around 1.2 million triangles per frame). Later on i added vertex normals to the geometry shader and started to work on some lighting/shadowing, but i ended up going back on the rendering side of the job. Meanwhile, i was speaking with a friend of mine about this idea and we were discussing ways to compute lighting but i couldn’t stop thinking about my real problem. So it came to me.

Previously, i have done some experiments with opengl hardware instancing, but never got to do much about it . What better time than now, so i grabbed the project and took it for a spin. After a few hours i had the same amount of cubes on screen with a much much better framerate. Quickly implemented some eye-candy (coloring, texturing, vertex lighting), some tweaking here and there and as i was listening to Mr. Peter Broderick (hi, i love you man) added some audio analysis to the feature list.
Last but not least, a kind of “Brownian Motion” was used to generate points in space, increased the cube count to 512*512 and watched it flow ( at 20fps ).

In conclusion, Hardware instancing was much easier to implement and performance seems much better at first sight. Above is a video of 262.144 audio-reactive cubes with GPU animation and basic lighting at around 20fps. For my video card i think that is very good. On a sidenote, i have not given up on the geometry shaders. I am not sure what will be my next step regarding the subject (back to geometry shaders?) but for now this is it. Hardware Instancing kicked Geometry Shaders in the ass.

Monologue Muet – Outside projection

victormartins — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 20:18:22 +0000

This is the outside projection for Monologue Muet exhibition, a photography work by Sue Elie Andrade De.
Based on her video called The Rain, i have created the outside projection with response to physical properties, like doors and windows.

xDA media lab, first project: GroundSpines Graffiti

victormartins — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 10:51:21 +0000

xDA is a new medialab located in Coimbra/Portugal. Here’s its first project using a customized version of (hmm 3.x) aka GroundSpines. enjoy the show and if you by any chance visit Coimbra, get in touch.. We’ll have a beer and talk crazy!

hmm.Daft Punk – Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger

victormartins — Sat, 23 May 2009 13:26:45 +0000

came to work, daft punk was playing, i was browsing my hd and opening projects. at some moment i opened this nebulado project which never satisfied me before and for my surprise it reacted quite nice to the track that was playing (Daft Punk – Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger), so i fired up Fraps and captured a video.

a smoother version was created which starts slower and builds up progressively, but i prefer this one

track by daft punk.

Old processing stuff

victormartins — Thu, 21 May 2009 19:32:58 +0000

Didnt want to forget about some of the the old shit i’ve done using processing, so i thought i should post it here. Audio-reactive Landscapes, 3D Tunnels, Cel-Shading, SineWave Additive, 3D Planes, and more..

More info + source: http://www.pixelnerve.com/p5/

Nothing’s demos

victormartins — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 22:22:04 +0000

ahhh nostalgia. Tonight after work and after playing around with some code i got bored and found myself in my demogroup’s FTP. So i spent some time checking out what i had accumulated all this years and i cleaned it up. There was lots of dead stuff in there. In between i found the videos of my old demos and since i didnt have anything better to do i downloaded them all and started watching. Oh man, now that was fun! I just love Flytrap, Harmony, Underscore, DP, S, Stay… Unfortunately i couldn’t get my MS-DOS demos to work. Wish i could, i have some funny stuff there.

Anyway, i just took those videos and i have uploaded some of my favourites to vimeo’s account. I believe it’s a good place to keep record of some of the oldies, so check it out if you’re in the mood.

hmm3.2 (the architect)

victormartins — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 09:39:51 +0000

Last weekend i was watching tv and there was this scene where there was a fly-by a plane and a city was being built just in front of you and after sometime the camera would look back and there it was. The big and awesome city that i can’t find the name. So i thought to myself, i should try and play the architect myself… Here’s some results:

hmm.3

victormartins — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 01:41:44 +0000

I have done a couple of jobs using ribbons but never got to make something i’ve always found pleasing to me eyes. I’ve seen over the web some guys creating interesting applications for this kind of generative “art”, its pretty used these days and it should, and just like i said a while ago, its beautiful; its very beautiful; things grow. I love to see things grow, and what kind of things grow? how do they grow? i don’t know, but its in my todo-list to find out and use that to upgrade this piece. I want it to have variations, different growing rates, different species and mix it all together and bring something good looking, good enough for realtime and appealing. Hopefully i won’t get bored before i achieve all this. Anyway here’s something i just did. awkward part: i’ve taken a 3d effect and converted it to 2d. uhmm i wonder why?

( this is the updated version of the effect. new scene with more growing things )