A great time of mine was when I decided not to work for a month and make a particle and music visualizer engine. The amazing OpenFrameworks.cc allowed me to build a very robust, flexible, and powerful engine, and to focus on what I really wanted to achieve, without getting bogged down by hardware details etc. The framework is for C++ on most major platforms.
The videos shown here are created by drawing particles and their reactions to each other given various forces. The trick is to draw the particles very fast so you can have a lot of them. Some clever opengl coding, VBOs, allowed me to draw a fantastic amount of particles. Finally, I added some music forces, that influence velocity, color, and others.
This first video starts out softly and then get’s more intense. The song is an unreleased studio track by Radiohead, and the video is my crowning achievement with this engine. It is best enjoyed in HD by going to the Vimeo page where it’s hosted.
This was another video done with the same engine. Like the name says, it’s just a technical demonstration of what’s possible.
Here are some images showing some primatives and other things I built using the engine. This is a cube equalizer, where the cubes hang from springy ropes attached at the “ceiling”.
Here is another picture of the particle swarm from the video above.
And here’s a nice one of the field, with the reactive comets. The description of what this is can be found on the vimeo page. Because you should watch it in HD, on the actual page, it’s only civilized… :P
