Alma – Generative Graphics Creator | Hacker News Reader

Alma – Generative Graphics Creator

alma.sh

120 pointskretaceous14 comments

There seems to be no way to inspect the intermediate signals. This makes it difficult to understand what you're actually looking at.

"Video synthesizer" is the usual term I see for these. There are a number of analog hardware video synths around, with the modern ones being Eurorack compatible. Digital is a little less common as a real-time synth since digital lends itself to prerecorded loops using more compute-intensive rendering methods. It's mostly a niche for live shows, but they are just pretty cool to play with.

This seems like it would be an awesome tool for visualizing orbitals / harmonics in quantum mechanics. It looks like Bessel functions are within the space of feasible functions you can make.

I love this idea of low-code generative art ... but I have no idea about what's going on here. This is probably (I assume) because I've never played/learned about the OpenGL Shading Language, the concepts of which the nodes are closely tied to?

Sort of. It's a pretty low-level execution graph, so you're seeing maths being done one operation at a time (then a node that does a lot of work all at once in code, which is unhelpful if you don't literally know GLSL)

Besides that, I would say you need to know about how a pixel/fragment shader works, which can be explained without any OpenGL details:

It is a program that runs once for each pixel of the screen, taking its coordinates within the screen as input (called UV), and outputting an RGB value.

The tricky part is not related to graphics specifically, but thinking in this stateless, independent, massively paralel way.

This reminds me of the fractal flames on the end credits of the movie Annihilation [1]. I was in such awe on how beautiful it was. That I became curious how they achieved the look. I found out that they used Chaotica [2].

[1] https://www.behance.net/gallery/60464675/Annihilation-End-Ti...

[2] https://www.chaoticafractals.com/

I don't need this tool, what I need is a way to build an intuition on how to do something with these concepts. I don't know how many times I've started and stopped shaders development because I just wasn't getting it.

Does anyone know of a library allowing the creation of graphical nodes and connections much like that software, then generating linked structures as output? For example, if I create some objects and define internal parameters, then connect inputs and outputs, it should produce structures with those parameters as elements, plus other fields representing pointers (or equivalents to) that link together the structures. Native low level languages would be better, both for speed and for easier integration in other software with an eye for very small systems or even microcontrollers.

Here's one - QT based: https://github.com/paceholder/nodeeditor

This is so much fun! I love generative art!

Alma could use a few tweaks to make it easier to use: - touchscreen. I did the pinch to zoom in which didn't work, nor did pan. - make it more obvious how to connect nodes - a hint on what the individual signals are

I love the "view all the code" button, it looks very promising for use with other tools.

Is there an open source library for these visualization/generator?

This one in particular looks really nice!! I’d like to use it to build something completely unrelated

Not a library, but https://github.com/GimelStudio/GimelStudio is in alpha and is aiming at the same problems.

Check out Tooll[1] or vvvv[2] (not os itself but many of its libraries are, like for example fuse[3]).

[1] https://github.com/still-scene/t3

[2] https://visualprogramming.net

[3] https://www.thefuselab.io

Check out "geometry nodes" in Blender (which is open source).

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