BIT-101
Bill Gates touched my MacBook Pro
Starts with a seed. It grows up and curls. At random points, it branches off. And on and on. Fades out in the end - I’ve been obsessed with smooth loops. Fading out before starting over is one way to deal with that.
I had an isometric (bimetric technically) library kicking around. I dusted it off and started adding it to my main bitlib library. I used Poisson Disk Sampling with different radii for shading on the sides, which was neat.
I think this is my best piece of the month. It requires a little (lot) of explanation. So I think I’ll save that for another whole post.
This prompt was in last year’s Genuary too. I was not happy with my example for that last year and not really happy with it this year. I did start adding SDFs to my main library, but I haven’t really figured out what to do with them yet. This was just a lot of random experimenting until I came up with something that looked interesting. I think it’s kind of using an SDF to create a flow field and drawing lines based on that. Meh.
This was done with a shader. That’s about all it’s got going for it. It did get me learning more about how to set up an OpenGL project, and I’ve been documenting my learning here: glsteps
One of my goals this year is to do longer, multi-scene videos with soundtracks. I totally rushed every part of this, but figured out a lot of the mechanics of how to accomplish this. Big learning on this: recently I added “scenes” to my rendering library. This was cool, but it was still all one big render. So if I wanted to change one parameter in scene 10, I still had to re-render every frame of every scene. With this piece I realized it’s going to be way more efficient to render scenes in chunks, export the video for each chunk and stitch them together at the end with ffmpeg. Here, I rendered anywhere from two to five scenes at a go. I started calling each chunk an “act”. This was all kind of ad-hoc, but I think I’ll adjust my library to allow for acts and scenes.
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