Magic Music Visuals

Thanks @Sadler!

Hey Y'all. Been ages.

Quick question - can we change the light source for 3D objects yet? Tried searching.

Thanks Eric, Sadler, I found a workaround. I copied the files to my desktop, where they were able to open. Interestingly, copying the original enclosing folder to the desktop did not work, as they refused to open from it. Tried saving them (the ones individually copied to desktop) to another folder,...

Hey Eric et al, Been out of the loop for a long time. Just installed 2.31 and a bunch of my old project files won't load. These projects go back to 2018 and earlier, so can't remember which version they were created with. Most crash when 0% is parsed on loading. :-( Example file: ABSTRACTS.magic Fol...

There is an AudioToImage module included with the base install. It takes an audio input and spits out an image which can be either the frequency spectrum or the waveform, or both. It's what you need for some inputs, thinking of FFT.

Pro Tip: I suggest reading the User's Guide ( https://magicmusicvisuals.com/downloads/Magic_UsersGuide.html ) front to back. There's a lot of functionality that's not immediately obvious, and I think you'll find that a lot of features you want are already in there. :-) When starting out with MMV, I ...

Haha. Thanks for not sharing Sadler.

And here's a start on an idea to do the light trail lights around the sword. (Very rough).

: Sword_lights.png (57 KiB) Viewed 5770 times

: Lighttrails_render.png (5.26 KiB) Viewed 5770 times

Once again, layering multiple versions with different settings (y-axis rotation, Starfield speed, etc) will add some more randomness in the effect.

Hey Morris, Thanks for the clarification. Much more specific. Keeping once again to that tree and sword video. Breaking it down, the light and snowflakes are both done with particle systems, and can't be replicated with just Magic. The snowflakes are exhibiting individual paths (they aren't just mov...

Hey Morris, There's no special name for those kinds of videos. None that I've ever heard anyway. Magic is more like an app for putting assets together to make scenes, rather than something you use to create graphics. If you want to make moving trees, you're going to have to learn to create and anima...

You can do this with modifiers, but I use the playlist to accomplish this. That way, you can edit the fade time easily without mucking with modifiers and modules. Take a look in the manual for specifics for how to use the playlist. If you have modules in the background, you can place whatever they a...

This is kind of exciting Sadler, thanks for checking it out. Seems simple enough to set up. As a gamer, control can be very precise. As an interesting side note, I'm not sure if you ever had an XBOX 360, but the built-in music visualizer NEON was setup so 4 people could control all aspects of the vi...

No need to update the code. :-) There's almost always a workaround. A lot of ISF's and modules will alias, it's just a fact of life when balancing visual quality over realtime performance. Having said that, sometimes the workarounds are computationally expensive. It will potentially impact framerate...

Ha! This brought a smile to my face. I love the concept!

Thank-you for that. That just demystified a lot of misconceptions. Much appreciated.

The Simplicity Paradox is a thing. When something appears simple, the back end infrastructure is always conversely complex.

I think I understand, but when adding a chain of modules, I am assuming the first module added creates a 2D plane object that is passed down that chain, so the "self" is referring to that specific plane. Even when adding a 3D object, is it correct that it's really a 2D render buffer of tha...

I was thinking that it would work as a Source/Feature combination.

i.e. If you added a scale transform, the Source would be "SELF" and Feature would be ".x, .y, .z" etc, and then you would add modifiers as usual.

Has the ability to sample pixel values at a coordinate been suggested before? Use case would be an array of objects that vary based on the values of the pixels beneath them, or at another specified point, allowing video content to be interpreted using objects, such as a grid of spheres, or a chunky ...

After doing some work in Director, I'm really digging the ability of that software to reference an object properties, such as .x, .y, .z, etc. Would there be a way to add variables/modifiers that can self-reference an objects position/scale, etc, or do you think that's best handled through globals? ...

Part of the problem is also that video compression algorithms are better with "natural" imagery and tend to do poorly with "synthetic" images. It's how they were designed: to take advantage that in a moving image the eye won't notice simplification in areas where the natural text...

Noise won't help with compression, but it will help with local rendering in realtime for some cases. When working in print, if there are gradients that have only a small difference between the values of the start and end colours, it's customary to add a little noise to avoid banding. Given that so m...

Before we get awesome animation features, my vote would be a less intense fix to the base 3D rendering first, (if its quicker to do the overhaul in phases). e.g. Definable light sources, basic surface shaders (ambient, specular, wireframe, bump mapping, normal mapping, phong, blinn, etc). It would g...

For most of my projects I've used Collada (.DAE) format. As a low-poly fan, instead of textures I've mostly used vertex colours, and it works well. I have used some .OBJ files, but Collada is my go to. Modelling software that's worked for me to import into MMV without issues are: Blender and MagicaV...

It's a freely available ISF module from the site http://www.interactiveshaderformat.com

Here's the direct link: https://www.interactiveshaderformat.com/sketches/1727

The more I think about this idea the more excited I get about the possibilities. This will make it possible to make "follow the leader" / chained objects, similar to the Hypnoworm ISF https://www.interactiveshaderformat.com/sketches/1655 pretty easily using a combination of transforms and ...

What an excellent idea!

Welcome to the forum. Short answer, no, not really. Long answer, from last week, can be found in this post: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1775

I've been using .DAE (Collada) as my go to format, and pre-baking lighting. I've also had good luck with using BLENDER to map lighting to vertex colours. Of course, these are static options that don't react dynamically. Currently 3D support is limited, and models are only lit as if there is a single...

I'd rather just use some open source scenes that are out there. I think that given the custom nature of most of the projects, and the effort involved in creating them, that there aren't open source scenes available for you to just use. Most video artists work long and hard at what they do and aren'...

The comments in the code indicate it's a port of a shader from http://www.SHADERTOY.COM . Unless otherwise stated shaders there are under a default CC-Attribution-NonCommercial-Sharealike 3.0 license. ( https://www.shadertoy.com/terms ) You can always try and contact the original authour for permiss...

I've used an inputSelector and multiple OBJ files to do simple "flipbook" style animation. Works pretty good with simple models, even if it is resource intensive. It's how I animated Trump and Putin in this piece (2-frame animations were all I needed for this project): https://vimeo.com/22...

Hey hazardman, I made an update to the Radial Blur Jittered ISF here: https://www.interactiveshaderformat.com/sketches/1359 (not my work, just a tweak.) It will address one of your requests, allowing for things like simulating a light shining through a logo. The range of motion on the x,y origin is ...

Thanks Eric! I always plan to, never quite seem to get around.

Thanks Sadler. I wanted to keep them relatively sparse so there's a nice balance between the performance of the physical object, and the interpretation. So excited to see how people play with it.

Hey, it's been a while. I'd like to share my latest Magic-enabled project. It's a hand-made instrument and visualizer called MONARCH that I'm debuting next Saturday at http://www.silencesounds.ca/ gallery in Guelph, Canada. MONARCH is an idiophonic butterfly-shaped physical synth. Comprised of 38 ma...

Pretty simple effect. Just a wide cloud texture applied to a Starfield. You'll need to make a PNG, or similar file with an alpha channel for the transparency on the clouds. I used a 4096px wide image for that video, but the 2MB file limit means I can only post an example image at 1024px wide. If you...

This question has been asked and answered a few times. This recent thread is a good place to start: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1394

One more thing to add is that a lot of compression algorithms (including YouTube's) exhibit most compression artifacts on red imagery. There are some good reasons for this, but the primary reason is that there are few natural images that are predominately red, and human vision sees the most amount d...

So just to make sure I understand this correctly. It's the 30 frames per second that's the problem. Nope. It's the AMOUNT of the image that changes from frame to frame. So, as Eric said, if only a small amount of the image changes, like a small object moving over a static background, those changes ...

Sadler wrote:Yup, Transform Scale XY, Source: 80kHz, Peak, Scale 0.5, Offset 1. Values are suggestions. Other stuff would need After FX or similar.

Did you mean 80Hz?

Would like to see something like this in the flesh because the video doesn't grab me. That's a fair criticism, and a bang on observation Sadler. This was a quick and dirty clip, but I don't think video is ever going do justice to the effect because it can never capture the three dimensionality of i...

Nicely done Visuality. I agree with other commenters that the simplicity and understated nature of this is the real hook. I particularly liked the sequence that starts around 1:00. It has a lot of depth, and I have a soft-spot for that sweeping "radar-style" waveform. (I used a similar one...

I present to you VRLENS Monitors . It's been a while since I've posted. My latest project has been about using MMV to drive analogue video filter mirrorbox kaleidoscopes mounted onto LCD panels. They are laser-cut, and viewers use a small "peep show" window to look into the virtual, infini...

Thanks visuality ! I'm starting in on a rework of this right now to push the gamification aspects further. Basically, converting more of the cooperative parts into competitive ones. I've had the chance to test this out with a crowd now, and the responses are really interesting. Part of the rework is...

Everything created in magic in this patch (outside of the open source video)

Nicely done. I love the graphic style.

Curious, where did you source the video?

Ah, I see your issue now. Apologies, guess I didn't read carefully enough. I have no answer. :-( So far, I've been underwhelmed by conditionals in Magic. I ran into similar (but unrelated) issues on an installation project this summer because Global Variables were not exposed to the Expression modif...

The if control in the expression modifier takes the generic form of:

if (x,y,z),

i.e. "If x is true then return y else return z"

The original x can be used as the z component, so if (x > 1.0, 3.0 , x) would return 3 when the condition is true and the original input x if not.

DROSTE: https://www.interactiveshaderformat.com/sketches/1382
META IMAGE: https://www.interactiveshaderformat.com/sketches/215
QUAD TILE: https://www.interactiveshaderformat.com/sketches/231

Could you rename the other one then? *ducks*

Did you have to set a Z-Translation to keep the specular model in front? Or are you combining with a Blend module in 2D? Any Z-fighting?

I probably should have prevented negative values in the Scale module from the beginning, but I don't want to change it now because it might screw up people's projects. Negative scaling is awesome! Please don't ever nerf that. There are times when using it to reverse a model or flip an image is the ...

Eric wrote:Personally my preference would be to have a keyboard-searchable menu where you start typing and it comes up with the matches (sort of like in the Google search bar), but I can see the benefit of your suggestion .

I like this idea. It's how BLENDER handles the interface and it's awesome.

Welcome Yornav! Also check out https://www.shadertoy.com and https://www.interactiveshaderformat.com . I personally really like the latter. Get in there and tinker with something that's already made as part of your learning. I've found that going in with limited knowledge, I was able to learn to mak...

Hey Sadler, MagicaVoxel really is top notch, wish it was more widely known. I'm glad to hear the piece is ambiguous – that's definitely what I'm shooting for. (No pun intended). When I've play-tested the interactive version it's been interesting to see how people engage with it emotionally. I know i...

The women and soldiers (and the fire video) are the only pre-rendered videos. The motion is stiff because those videos only advance frames based on the audio, so if someone refuses to drum they are static. Slow if they drum soft, fast if they drum loud. Everything else is animated in Magic. A lot of...

https://vimeo.com/221618926/543236b2cf This is an interactive piece I've been working on for several weeks. It's for an apocalypse-themed event. This demo uses canned audio, but in the live performance only the intermission sequences will have that. Otherwise, audience members will be drumming on t...

"Video unavailable" Is it set to private?

D1gits wrote: Is there a basic shader to start with, that stores a buffer from an input or example or where do I start?.

Try starting with this Chroma Key ISF: https://www.interactiveshaderformat.com/sketches/642

Hey, welcome to MMV. I've given this constructive criticism a few times before: that is a long time to expect a viewer to look at what is essentially one effect. Try switching it up, or evolving the effect to move through stages that, while still directly driven to the source audio, give the chance ...

Nice work! I love how anonymizing the kinect is - probably made it easy for people to play with it without being self-conscious. Bravo.

Thanks Eric. I'll pivot.

Is there any way to compare Globals? Or, are there plans to let the EXP modifier use Globals? Right now I'm working on an interactive piece for a festival. I'm taking two mic inputs attached to drums and using them to drive the scale of an object. What I would like to do is use the inputs, so that o...

Since you asked, I think Sadler is spot on about judicious minimizing. There's a lot of real estate taken up in your file by groups of ( Scale, Translate, Hue ) modules that once set, can be minimized. If they are just positioning for layout, you don't really need to have all those controls exposed ...

Thanks Eric! I did not know that. I thought that a range was required. I guess this is a never-ending learning experience. :-) EDIT: I tend to edit shaders over at http://www.interactiveshaderformat.com, and if you don't supply a MIN & MAX then the input sliders default to 0-1 regardless, making...

Well, the ISF format requires inputs to have a range. Magic's approach is to try to standardize that from 0-1, with the understanding that a modifier stack can be built to normalize any input to a 0-1 range. The rotation issue is always workable, and isn't limited by stopping at 1. i.e. 7.5 full rot...

It has to have a range. 0-1 is pretty standard. You can use modifiers to achieve limitless rotation. e.g. for constant rotation use RAMP instead of INCREASE, or apply a WRAP modifier to your stack. The core function is actually based on X and Y aready. If you look at the ISF code you will see two va...

Hey Reinhard, I took a moment to pull out the BarbellRad function from that ISF and give it a full suite of controls you can work with in Magic without having to do any coding. It works with Polar Coordinates as input. Basically, the endpoints of the line are specified as an angle (from 0 - 1), and ...

Hey Reinhard, I've only tested VideoHeightField++ on V2 versions of Magic, but it should work on 1.65. Which version are you using? BTW VideoHeightField++ takes two inputs, one for the height and one for the colour. (VideoHeightField+ only takes one for both). Editing ISF shaders is a lot of fun if ...

I did some more work on this last night. For circular layouts and effects I think it will be easier to specify geometry in Polar Coordinates. There's new functions in the ISF now to accommodate that. Commands that are specified in polar coordinates are labelled with the suffix "Rad" So, no...

Hey Reinhard, I did some research and found this piece on Shadertoy that was reworkable: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/Xd2XWR I've taken the time to port it over to ISF with modifications and have annotated it to make it clear how it works. For convenience I've set up the demo to use variables for ...

Wow, that's a stunning effect for just 2D lines and points. Interested to hear more if you make any progress.

Cheers!

I also love that look! I've been doing some experimenting over the past few months and have hacked a couple of ISFs that echo that look, or make it possible. The circular and square extrusions bits could be done with this ISF ( VideoHeightfield++ ): https://www.interactiveshaderformat.com/sketches/1...

Well, perhaps someone else will find it useful. I know I will.

Cheers!

And... DONE!

Turns out it was a trivial change. Now the first input is the heightfield, and the second is the colour. I present Video Heightfield++:

https://www.interactiveshaderformat.com/sketches/1748

P.S. Output is still 2D. But the X-Rotate and Y-Rotate parameters change the viewpoint.

Ah, I see where you're coming from now. Yeah, that ISF only fakes the illusion of Z. There's very few ISFs that actually work in 3D, like I said, although there's actually the functionality in the specification to manipulate geometry, the vast majority of them are just 2D fragment shaders. To get th...

ok will set it to public for a short time! surprised the link doesn't work after you logged into youtube There's three options for YouTube privacy settings: Public, Unlisted, and Private . Unlisted will allow someone with the URL to be able to view it, while excluding it from searches and other lis...

Link doesn't work. Private videos are... well... private.

Hi artnik, I have been experimenting with the ISF modules. I would have to show you an example to what I mean by adding a Z parameter. At the minute I’m cleaning up my ‘project templates’, after Eric solved my problem. Most likely upload a sample to youtube with a simple beat or somebody else’s tra...

Just curious, what do you mean by a "Z" parameter? ISFs output 2D images, not 3D geometry. From what I can see, looking at the code, the CENTER parameters adjust in X and Y, while the LEVEL parameter creates the illusion of a bump in Z already.

How would you want it to be different?

Sadler wrote:A "module that collected transforms back up the chain" could preserve transform order.

Clever idea.

Eric wrote:What about Scale though? When you have all three types of transformations, there needs to be a way to select the order.

Riiight. My bad.

Out of curiosity, would the drop down visually reorder the inputs in the list, or just how they are interpreted?

Yup I've thought of something like this. I think a Repeater module would work actually. The only problem would be the order of operations (do you scale and then translate, or translate and then scale?), but I think I could solve it by having a drop-down box that lets you choose the order. Instead o...

Thanks Hazardman.

MUCH BETTER! It totally has a sense of momentum now. Well done.

thanks sadler for your input... no being able/know how to animate the worm hole within MMV, i was unable to figure out a way to translate the tetrahedron to coincide with the wormhole geometry...would love to make it bank in sync with it...i did try to use a translate module to move it around in sp...

Me too.

Nice. I've been working on something like this for an interactive piece. Amazing what you can push Starfield to do with a little massaging. :-) I like the colourizing approach – that's a seriously elegant use of Trails. Makes me wish Starfield had depth cueing/distance fading, so you could reinforce...

Would that not currently be achievable through the drop downs in the Audio/Midi window by changing what's associated with the Inputs? Or are you thinking of something else?

: Screen Shot 2017-02-20 at 11.09.16 AM.png (95.92 KiB) Viewed 3190 times

Pulse Scale.magic: (1.66 KiB) Downloaded 400 times

Input 0 is set to be the 0 channel of an imported sound file.

Two transforms in series would allow you to add two channels for rotation, position and scaling. Two AudioToImage modules can be blended together to combine channels. Hey Sadler, yup, I have looked into both of these. Ultimately, doubling up on modules is going to be the solution, but I was hoping ...

In your "Time-based Activity" thread you wanted to solve a similar problem, and I advised you that MODIFIERS, or an external MIDI timeline program was what you were looking for. (https://magicmusicvisuals.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1178) The solution to this problem is the same, be...

I'll say it again, doing this would be trivial by using an Increase Modifier, with a small value. Combined with an Offset modifier for the initial translation.

Suspected as much. (Although it won't work for this project, that Z-sorting trick is neat

).

Thanks Eric!

I am working on a proposal for a live installation piece and I am wondering if there is a way to sum audio inputs. I'd like to have visualizations that react to real-time stereo microphone input. The goal is to have three primary visual elements, one to react to LEFT channel, one to react to RIGHT c...

Well, not really programming. That aspect is in the visual module layout and wiring, more than the modifiers. For example, if you set an audio source, and then use an INCREASE modifier with 0.0 as it's input then it will increase, but only in response to the audio cue. Once you grok it, it's pretty ...

Oh. Look into the MODIFIERS in general, and the EXPRESSION modifier. It sounds like a timeline would not be necessary for those kinds of things. MODIFIERS let you use math operations to change things, with or without audio input, so, for example, you could use an INCREASE modifier with a small value...

Not really. AFAIK, the closet thing is the PLAYLIST.

Having said that, you could use an external MIDI program that has a timeline, and use it to trigger visuals in Magic.

Awesome!

Well, if not perhaps in the future? It looks like that library supports more than single line code. It would be like adding scripting.

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