V-Ring experiments
2013oct21
After submitting my entries to the 2014 Punto Y Raya festival, I started looked at the work by the other artists who had made submissions.
X by Max Hattler had a "glowing line" effect that I liked ...
... and I decided to add something like that to my toolkit.
Since I've always been fond of neon signs, the first thing I wanted to make was a sort of tubular shape.
The straight parts could be done using things I already had on hand (shaded triangles) ...
... but the end caps ...
... weren't something I'd done before. I had an elliptical ring in my toolkit, but not a partial ring.
2014feb10
To make a partial ring "graphics primitive" (basic shape) something I could use a lot of different ways, I designed it so that all of its attributes were variable: inner/outer width (for start/end of the ring), inner/outer color, starting/ending center points, starting/ending angle, horizontal/vertical radius, etc.
To get a sense of what my "variable ring" could do, I wrote a test program to draw a bunch of them with random values ...
... and then another, in which the values were varied continuously (looks best in HD, so you have to click that)...
That showed me there was a lot to explore!
I put the end caps on the neon bulbs, and made a sample video ...
2014feb11
My next experiments went through this sequence ...
2014feb12
That last one was interesting enough that I tried doing a real video with it—a re-make of Debussy's First Arabesque.
This reminded me of hearts, and since Valentine's Day was coming up, I posted it on YouTube ...
2014feb13
The "hearts" animation didn't take advantage of the variable ring's ability to rotate, so I next experimented with that.
Here's First Arabesque again, with a rotating "bird of paradise" shape ...
That's a pretty modest effect ... I would like to do something more dramatic ...
2014feb15
In this test, I noticed an interesting effect ...
... in which the shapes appear to be moving although they don't get anywhere. I can't recall having seen this before.
2014feb22
One thing I'd been dissatisfied with in the past was the way my moving notes behaved with notes with longer durations: aural effect was that the note stayed put until the next note was about to sound, but the visual effect was that the note moved continuously; very disconcerting. So, I worked out a formula...
... that expressed position as a non-linear function of time. This gave me the effect I wanted: for small values of t (times close close to the next note), the exponent is close to zero, so the expression is close to one (position close to the next note), but for longer times, the expression goes toward negative one (which, for large values of C, causes the expression to go toward zero—positions close to the previous note).
I did a couple of videos using it to depict the solo voice of Andreas Scholl, and was pleased with the results. I don't have permission to publish those videos, so I re-did my video of the 6-voice ricercare from Bach's Musical Offering using the effect...
As it turns out, that piece looks pretty nice with the "neon" renderer, too...
2014mar21
Here's a version that includes bending trajectories on the non-subject lines ...