This beautiful video was made by Miika Kuisma (Soundcloud page) utilizing geometries made by me, shortly after first version of GeoKone was released. The music is by Above & Beyond, so we didn’t release it back then, but now I feel that any content that can quiet and relax you for a while is worth releasing! Everything is a remix after all!
I have watched this video many times, with tears going down my eyes, and I dont even really understand why, the music has a lot to do of course, but Miika has the skill to create emotions in the viewer with little subleties. May this bring harmony and joy to you, and inspire to create also!
For the last three weeks, I had been working on creating an interactive GeoKone.NET powered geometry installation for Kosmos 2015 Festival. The idea was to create an interactive installation that people could control themselves and synchronize the visuals to the music playing on the Spacetime Stage at the festival.
Designing the controller interface
Google Chrome browser has webmidi -support builtin, so connecting a Korg Kaosspad R3 controller to my laptop and reading midi -signals was pretty easy. Just had to figure out how to have some kind of intelligent and intuitive controls.
The idea was also not to break the geometry or the visuals, because with GeoKone you can pretty easily crash the browser, because exponential growth in processing and memory when increasing the recursion depth or number of points in the scene.
So I had to design some kind of limitations too, so that people could not mess up the beautiful scenes. And really to create new scenes with the controller was too difficult, so I created a bunch of nice scenes people could browse and select one to modify and work from there.
I’m pretty happy how the installation turned out! Here are a couple of videos from the event (Thanks to Suvi Suvereeni for filming and sharing):
People really seemed to enjoy this, as I observed people staying on the controller for long periods of time, some even as long as 30 minutes. Visitors also got the hang of synchronizing the visuals to the music, which was nice to see! :) Here is a quote from a user:
‘That was awesome! I hope I will get to try that again some time, one of the best moments of this summer for sure!‘
So! This means that in the future, GeoKone will have MIDI -support! You can plugin any controller and control the scenes with your favorite hardware .. how about that :) Can’t wait to implement this properly.
Also, big thanks to Miika Kuisma and Samuel Aarnio for helping me on site, and for everybody who collaborated on the stage and made this possible.
Until then, now work continues again on Geometrify, which about I will update more info later.
I had some inspiration to do a long requested tutorial on how to export movies out of GeoKone, so I decided to make it as the new version 0.99.62 has the ability to export frame-by-frame by using the combination of “PrintScreen/ctrl+p, ‘ (quote), Enter” keyboard shortcuts.
Here is the tutorial video, featuring background music by my friend Luminescent:
With this technique you can also export GIF -animations! Here is an example:
This image showcases the Hue Rotation feature in the new release
Enjoy this new feature and have fun, go to http://GeoKone.NET and start playing around with these new features!
GeoKone.NET has just evolved into a very fine tuned rainbow fractal machine, Unicorns and Nyan Cats watch out! Color hue animation support will bring out so much new exciting possibilities, especially when combined with the tracing option. Warning: may cause epilepsy or flashbacks of the 70s! ;)
Automatic hue animation!
Much UI polish, renaming of formations to layers, more keyboard shortcuts. Overall, just slowly cooked polish (no offend to people of Poland) everywhere! Oh yeah, everything is now saved and loaded from the Cloud, those old servers were so boring, the new clouds are much better! (cough).
Another example. Imagine what you can do with this!
More refined example when hue rotation speed is lower
Another example. You could create beautiful wallpapers with this.
Point Radius Ratio setting removed, breakage of old scenes with points
Unfortunately something old must go in order to make room for new, so I removed the Point Radius Ratio parameter to simplify things, now you only set the Point Radius directly. The behaviour of this also changed, now the point sizes are directly related to the Child Radius Ratio setting, so you can create images like this:
Rorschach like patterns with new point radius behaviour
Also, big thank you again anybody who has donated! I will make a list of GeoKone.NET supporters. Your money has gone towards paying the servers and purchasing some nice music from http://bandcamp.com, so you are indirectly supporting other indie artists too!
Here are a couple of images I created today with GeoKone.NET, just to showcase some of the new features coming up in the next version. Here you can prominently see the Hue Rotation feature, which allows you to animate the hue of colors automatically. This creates some very nice, very modern art style looking images, while changing parameters same time as the animation and tracing is running (Click for full resolution versions):
Beautiful combination of colors
Another example of point size changing while animating
Rotating the formations around and changing point radius can create this kind of vortex like effect
Modern art, probably if a famous artist did this on a canvas could sell for 100 000 euros ;P
The Hue Animation brings out the fractal nature of these formations
In this you can see very paint like features
Explosion of color, zooming and changing point radius while tracing
Changing the opacity and zoom level while tracing creates this kind of camera like effects
Here you can see the point radius parameter is changed carefully manually while the formation animates
Beautiful Rainbow Star, a Six Pointed formation traced around and again point radius changed carefully with the keyboard while animating
Do you know any other software that can create this kind of artistic results ? I dont think there are many others like this, if you do, please leave a comment! I would love to in the future to integrate geokone as an artistic brush into some more advanced image editing tools .. but that is something that is coming in the future maybe!
Now go to http://GeoKone.NET and start Creating Art Yourself, Now! This hue animation feature is not yet live, but is coming in the next version! And remember, always have fun, whatever you are doing!
My friend Hystereo Psychovsky discovered some time ago that you can listen to images with FL Studio Beepmap plugin. So he tested out feeding it some Sacred Geometry images made with GeoKone.NET, and heard that some of the results are almost resembling music and natural progressions, or like sounds from some animals, like crickets, or very spacey sounds, like coming from another dimension.
These are just some of the images we tested, some would generate even like Icaro -like chants or songs, but those will be saved for future videos. There is definitely some potential here, hopefully at some point we will be implementing pure generative sound into GeoKone, at some version :) Imagine creating audio visually from recursive geometry ^_^
At this point I want to share some great GeoKone.NET based creations that users of GeoKone have been sharing with us at our Facebook page.
I wouldn’t have ever thought somebody would make something like this with GeoKone.NET, and it’s great for me as a developer to see that people can express themselves through the software, there is enough variables that you can play around to express certain characteristics of yourself that seem somehow personal.
This is great, I hope to see many more in the future, and hope to implement Loading & Sharing of scenes as soon as possible! :)
Here’s the images, the first ones are by Cody Fuqua:
Love the synchronicity here. And seeing the big picture.
Reminds me of Tibetan Mandalas and their energies. Great use of color.
I Love the Shading and Roudness of shapes here. Something I thought was not possible before.
Harmonizing and calm. Like a digital flower.
I will update more scenes soon, this is for now :) These were all created with GeoKone.NET, an interactive geometry generator that runs in your browser!
New version of http://GeoKone.NET is online! Now comes with Animation! ^_^
If you want to see straight away some examples live in GeoKone, load these files into GeoKone via “Scene/Load Local File”:
Hit the Animate button with these and they will start to animate, and you can modify the contents realtime of course.
Animation & Tracing!
Release Notes
Animation support! Support for rotating and scaling the formations based on adjustable parameters. Very cool :) Supports tracing also. No support for exporting animated scenes as images yet, though.
Use keyboard commands ‘0’ (Zero) to toggle animation, ‘9’ to toggle rotation, ‘8’ to toggle scaling.
Changed checkbox appearance to switches
Keyboard command ‘Del/Backspace’ now used to delete formations
Page Up/Page Down now select active formation also
Print Screen shows Export Image dialog
Tighten the UI layout a bit
Fixed the Randomizer and added better color presets
Realtime Animation
Animation support! Glad to announce that GeoKone.NET now supports animating the formations in real time. Each formation can be Rotated & Scaled in real time, with parameters for controlling the scaling and rotation. You can use keyboard command ‘0’ to toggle the animation, and commands ‘8’ for toggling Scaling and ‘9’ for Rotation.
Using the Tracing Feature
With animation you can also trace the movement, leave trails of the moving formations, while animating, which can lead you to some very pretty images! No support for saving these traced images yet (except of course taking a screen shot).
Creating Vortexes. Change the Line Color while Tracing :)
Also due to couple of users telling me about this, the keyboard command for Delete has been moved to ‘Backspace/Del’. Thanks for the feedback! Hopefully having Undo some day too :D
Very Interesting Shapes can now be found!
Got my Oculus Rift DevKit last week .. let’s see where this goes with GeoKone in the future ;)
Start Creating Geometry!
Now go to http://www.GeoKone.NET and starting playing around with the Animation! Try out different scale frequencies, rotation speeds (also negative!) and see what kind of worlds you can find!
