post your eye melty abstracts here

[absolom7691]

After reading DZ's thread about using frames for abstract seeds, I decided to put a few together.

[swamidog]

spending a little quality time in outer space...

[absolom7691]

I have a question, how were some of the more complex abstracts projected? They seem very complex for any projector I've seen on sale to handle. http://imgur.com/QRmUz3J

Photographing a scanned image takes a little finesse. In order to get a complete image, the camera shutter needs to stay open long enough for the entire image to be drawn by the scanners. This works perfectly for static frames. For abstracts, it is a little different since the image is constantly changing. Most of the time, I leave the shutter open anywhere from 1/15" to as slow as 1/4" second. Most of the more complex images have a lot of flicker in person. They still look amazing and complex and eye melty though!

This is the same reason why video doesn't work well. At 29.97 frames per second, the shutter can't be set very slow and the effects of the camera can ruin what the abstract really looks like. It works okay for some abstracts but others don't look good at all.

[Galvonaut]

First I gotta say most of the images and videos here are truly eye-melting.

I have a question, how were some of the more complex abstracts projected? They seem very complex for any projector I've seen on sale to handle.
I have some old non-laser abstract stuff like that and they are over 50000 "points". http://imgur.com/QRmUz3J

You can say that again Dream! Eye-melty, brain-melty, all sorts of melty. I never get bored of Swami's abstracts

You are right about being too complex for most projectors on the market. Unless you pay really silly money and it will still probably be a custom build, you are unlikely to get stuff like this projecting from a retail laser projector. They tend to be built for higher power beam shows, so beam specs go out of the window somewhat.

I've invested a lot of time in researching how this stuff is done and I've still only scratched the surface, suffice to say, I have invested in the first components for my abstract/graphics laser projectors. The only thing I've managed to decide on is the diodes - single mode from DTR. I imagine each build is going to cost in the region of £3000, maybe more as I have some technical requirements I still have to solve. Factor in my time and this is a completely mad exercise - the behaviour of some sort of crazed addict To buy the equivalent already built may cost orders of magnitude more - that is if you could find something on the market that has these capabilities.

You will see from PL how much love is put into people's builds. What you put in is what you get out

Keith

[dzodzo]

you can fool the flicker by projecting the abstract at very long distance with very small scan angle, e.g. not in your living-room but on the opposite house or so...

[norty303]

I was having a play around with Beyond last night and it struck me that one of the things that would assist in the 'sell' of a 3D abstract is use of subtle dimming of the components in the background.
Perspective goes so far, but making the 'far' parts dimmer would accentuate the near parts.
Does anyone do anything of the kind for their abstracts?

I'm trying to think how it could be achieved (in any format/application) and the best I've come up with is a brightness rotation running at the same speed as the abstract rotation but in the negative direction (a bit like the way the turn of the moon is the same speed as the orbit around the earth so it always faces us)

Thats all well and good, until you start to turn the abstract in multiple dimensions, maybe audio triggered, and then it all gets very complex, very quickly! (brain-melty!)

It may well be that this is a job for mapping an abstract properly to a 3D object and doing proper line hiding, but I reckon you could get there witha bit of good math (or maybe even a function I'm missing!)

[Galvonaut]

I'm not sure about Beyond, but I believe you can do this with LSX, using depth cues.

I've only just started to understand depth cues, but from my little experience with LSX I am sure that there is a way of making these cues behave in any way you wanted.

Is this the sort of thing you are thinking about?



Keith

[dzodzo]

i believe swami used it for the yellow rings in his 440 abstract show (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OByWW...UMk2ilKw#t=162)

[swamidog]

right the yellow rings in my 440 show have both perspective and depth effects.

http://youtu.be/OByWWTtIbNw


here's another example. in this one, the depth shading is set very aggressively so there's a very distinct termination of what's shown and what's hidden.

i believe swami used it for the yellow rings in his 440 abstract show

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OByWW...UMk2ilKw#t=162)

[White-Light]

I was having a play around with Beyond last night and it struck me that one of the things that would assist in the 'sell' of a 3D abstract is use of subtle dimming of the components in the background.

Have you tried Power Effect or Soft Line Endings?