how to make psychedelic visuals?

General Discussion Other

blindmano..

how to make psychedelic visuals?

in General Discussion • Other • 3 years ago

Hi,

Im originally a sound programmer (SuperCollider) but the last months Im starting to get into Processing. My interest is to make hypnotic, epileptic, psychedelic etc visuals - the aesthetic ideal close to these examples:

link, link, link, link

Now, I know as much as what topics I want to explore are fractal and moiré techniques, but I would really like to get my hands on some research material where I can find concepts to use and apply in Processing. Possibly where I dont have to have a math degree to understand it.

So, Im wondering if any of you got any good tips, techniques, links, or know of any topics that Im missing? Are there any libraries more suited for these kind of calculations?

many thanks.

Replies(3)

mrsprock

Re: how to make psychedelic visuals?

3 years ago

First of all you should look at all those examples that come with processing and just tweak some values.
For example I just opened basics-color->wave gradient and just changed the line
py = i+sin(radians(angle))*amplitude;
to this
py = i+sin(radians(angle+frameCount*0.1))*amplitude;

When you now delete the line noLoop() you already got some basic animated colorful moiree patterns. ;)

So, just play around with sin, cos and noise... the examples in the effects folder are surely interesting too but they are quite hard to understand i guess.

monkstone

Re: how to make psychedelic visuals?

3 years ago

For static Moire patterns and fractals cfdg has a lot to offer, also you get used to the idea of recursion which can be quite handy in generating patterns. Here is one little perlin noise sketch that I translated from vanilla processing to ruby processing from Biothing.org that might give you some ideas (unfortunately I can't now find original).

blindmano..

Re: how to make psychedelic visuals?

3 years ago

Thanks for the suggestions and links! One more question - of the sketches that I have seen that are of these aesthetics, all of them seem to process pixel by pixel for each frame. It is then hard to make the visuals live because they demand a lot of cpu. Are there any classes or libraries, or techniques that can make this easier on the cpu? Sorry if this is obvious, im quite fresh.