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Omega Code January 8th 2009, mr.doob


More audio visualisers! Yeey!

Early December last year Marcelo invited me to join his Omega Code project where lots a visual artist were going to create a illustration/poster for each of the track on the band's first album.

My take on the project would be creating a visualiser for the website. Although at first I planned to create a tool to get some curves to match each track (which is something I want to do this year) I ended up running out of time and had to go back on trying to get the best out of the FFT.

On top of that, ever since the first time Ithaqua quickly explained on a random forum (spanish) his way of animating octopus-ish meshes in 3D I always wanted to implement it and this time, and as most of the posters were quite circular, this seemed to be a good opportunity.

If you're wondering how have it's done here it's a quick explanation. Imagine having 20 spheres each one slightly bigger than the previous one; all of the centred. Now hide them and draw lines from each point in between each sphere. That would be a line from the point 0 of the sphere 0 to the point 0 of the sphere 1 and so on. You'll end up with a hair ball. Unfortunatelly, the drawing API of flash is a bit slow and it will be a hair ball of 20 or so hairs. From there you should be able to guess the rest :)



Once the effect was done, it was a matter of spending a lot of hours tweaking parameters, testing with different tunes, and finally quickly integrating it with the website interface developed by scarpelini.

I hope you find the end result as mesmerising as I do :)
11 comments

At least in firefox with flash 10 there is no octopus effect in the bacgkround. (with and without graphic acceleration)
In Opera 9 and Ie 7 it works with flash 9
January 9th 2009, r3D
Uh, you're not the first one. Windows/Firefox then? I'll try to see what's going on.
January 9th 2009, mr.doob
I've just tried on Windows/Firefox. Maybe you can check the exact version of the flash player you're running? :S
http://www.adobe.com/products/flash/about/
January 9th 2009, mr.doob
You have version 10,0,12,36 installed
Windows XP 32 bit SP3
Firefox 3.05

But interesting enough today is working!. Strange because I tried closing and opening firefox several times. Hmm...

January 9th 2009, r3D
I get the following error with the debug player:

SecurityError: Error #2123: Security sandbox violation: SoundMixer.computeSpectrum: http://omegacode.net/files/visualiser.swf cannot access rtmp://69.16.184.154/n9u5n7x7/_definst_. No policy files granted access.
at flash.media::SoundMixer$/computeSpectrum()
at ru.park.sound::BeatDetector/analyseSpectrum()
at Main/loop()

I also see no octopus effect.

I have flash version 10,0,12,36 installed
Windows XP 32 bit SP3
Firefox 3.05

(Same as r3D)
January 9th 2009, Brent
Uh, I miss the debug version of the player. I just realised that they released a debug version last month. That will help.

I had the feeling something like that was happening. But I don't know what that rtmp:// address is doing there. I got the feeling is just the computeSpectrum trying to analyse a missing stream. I'll put a try/catch around it, I was using park.ru beatDetector class and it didn't have it.

I'll do that this evening. Thanks for the help guys! :)
January 9th 2009, mr.doob
If Brent had another website open in a different tab, it can produce Security sandbox violations, as I found sometime ago: http://soledadpenades.com/2007/09/24/security-sandbox-violation-how-come/

"It seems to happen because the player doesn't distinguish between different movies, and treats all the sounds as if they belonged to the same soundspace (like a namespace, but for sounds :D), hence it tries to mix them all together and process the soundSpectrum of this global mix. Obviously, they don't belong to the same domain, and that's why you'll soon get errors."
January 9th 2009, sole
It works here, and it rocks. Right on!
January 10th 2009, Z
Wow! Nice work.. Looks amazing!
January 12th 2009, SOwl
beautiful
January 18th 2009, ozgur uksal
this is simply amazing! the animation is so smooth and fluid. and i LOVE the way all the triangles expand and darken when he starts growling! an amazing demo!
January 23rd 2009, xero / the.fontvir.u