MSAFluid, Cinder and Datamoshing

Posted on May 21st, 2012

OMG such a crazy year, I haven’t even had a moment to post all my pictures from Colombia and Europe but I finally have some spare time to go trolling the web for something new I can learn this year. As some of you may or may not know I became interested in vjing about a year ago. Vjing is an interesting beast, there’s so many different technologies that can be integrated and I am glad I became interested in it when I did. Im a Modul8 user and there are amazing things you can do with it but much like any thing else in life there are limits to what can be done with it. What keeps me most entertained is figuring out how to do the things I can’t do (this goes for everything in my life). So that’s pretty much why I post about these random technologies, cause I’m interested in learning them and well they look cool.

So let’s start with MSAFluid, not very new but…

MSAFluid is an opensource library for solving and displaying real-time fluid simulations based on Navier-Stokes equations and Jos Stam’s paper Real-Time Fluid Dynamics for Games. It was inspired by the brilliant Plasma Pong (even with some advice by the author, Steve Taylor)..

You can play with an online interactive Java version here.

I wanted to get this working as a layer in Modul8 (M8). I knew I had to get the signal from the MSAFluid library (compiled somehow) to patch it into syphon (that took a while to figure out, i’m new to this). Well MSAFluid isn’t a quartz composer file, which M8 plays well with so I grabbed these:

Get the Java version (for processing) here.

Get the C++ version (for openFrameworks or Cinder) here.

What do I use? Processing or OpenFrameworks. Both are not easy to jump into although I’d say with processing I was able to get results quicker. The fact is, since they both work well with syphon (not a lot of frame rate loss), I was just a matter choice and fortunatly there are way smarter people on the internet that are willing to help (which is another discussion), like Miguel Espada. He did a whole series of video tutorials on getting processing into modul8 and this was the final result of all my searching and asking.

As a side note i think what i’ve looking for lately is a way to project generative art while vjing, making and finding clips is cool but I need MOAR!

Next we have Cinder, a peer-reviewed, free, open source C++ library for creative coding. Don’t worry I don’t come from a coding background either. “CINDER PROVIDES A POWERFUL, INTUITIVE TOOLBOX for programming graphics, audio, video, networking, image processing and computational geometry.” I have yet to dig too deeply into this platform but this one of the many things that have been built using Cinder:

Dope right. Makes you wann try and figure it out right!

Next we have some datamoshing tutorials, it’s a three part series but you start here:

There’s a couple different ways to achieve the datamoshing effect live using FreeFrame but some of the plugins are a little pricy like these ones vj fx made. Plus some work some don’t in modul8.

Last for today is Dmesh, this shit cray:

Free version in the app store.

There’s also a pro version which includes Dynamic Control of Mesh Density and Sequence Images Import/Export with talks of being able to import movies too.

Which i’m now wondering….in the datamoshing package there’s a tool which creates a sequence of iframes and pframes, i wonder if you could just use those with the sequence importer, might need to get that pro version…..check.