I finally took the time to clean up this project and make a public release. In the packages you will find binaries and source code for the application, so if you’re thinking of using it and come up with something nice, let me know. After the first release i have fixed some problems with memory access and crashes. I have also added a simple UI for easy pick of tags from the “data/tags” folder on your hard-drive.

What is it?
- GML Viscosity is an experiment. It is application used to draw GML tags on a viscous liquid rendered purely on the GPU side.

What does it do?
- It liquifies your tags, in a way you can hardly read them but still looks cool (thats graffiti).
- It is possible to load gml files from the disk or directly from the “lots of zeros”book database.

How can I interact?
- Not implemented on this version. This version selects and draw gml files randomly from the web or from a tags folder. For a smart person it should be easy to add mouse support. The code is also prepared to support multitouch so, it should be easy to implement TUIO and create your multitouch version.
- Use ‘r’ key to randomly fetch a new tag from the website and if available it will draw it on the screen.
- Use the GUI window to pick any tag from the folder “tags” inside data folder.

Where can i get it?
Windows Version | MacOSX Version

Have fun.

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.

At first, there was the idea to use metaballs for the creatures, we wanted to give this jelly surfaces some wobbling/round forms. After some testing we decided not to, as i did not see any advantage specially in performace,  so we went with a more “traditional” method.  The creatures were generated from 2 steps. The body and the head.

The body: Create a skeleton line and generate a deforming cylindrical body from the line. After some time and tweaking the body right. After just had to start playing with values to get the animation going. Some trig + using creature’s motion parameters worked just fine, we got it right, but, there was still a problem, the creature’s heads. The head: Well i tried different methods, interpolating the body’s end with some spherical shape wish ease on, but it did not work out. The head textures just didn’t look good, “pinched” as Jody said several times.  We ended up creating the head as a second step, building an hemisphere and then “attaching”  it to the body’s end. Good news is later on, it came handy, as it made things alot easier to map the head’s texture. Some things just come handy sometimes. I had to tweak a bit to get the head and body animation get along, but in the end it turned out to look pretty good.

As for the lighting side, a kind of “ambient light” + phong lighting + cubemap reflections made it to the final version.

This is an awesome project and i really enjoyed working with the team. As said before this should not be a closed project, it was projected to live and change so it can fit other ambients, so expect to see more from the *mighty* Grazing Jellies.

Some videos on the development blog.

Full article on the festival @ Wired.

Oh, such good memories.