Random Animations | Hacker News Reader

Random Animations

bleuje.com

481 pointsggrelet61 comments

I'd have found this much more interesting if the animations were rendered in the browser - I would have loved to poke around the code that makes them work.

They're neat looking, but being served videos and not code leaves an itch unscratched.

I had the opposite reaction. I can see them on a phone in lockdown mode that fails to render many of the fancy modern JavaScript pages.

He publishes a couple with the source code: https://github.com/Bleuje/processing-animations-code

Also he published some full tutorials that are more conceptual, which you can find here: https://bleuje.com/tutorials/

I found the tutorials had a lot of awesome ideas (like traversing 4d noise for a seamless loop!) which I ended up playing with in my own projects. I don't use processing like he does, but all the tutorials are very easy to understand even if that's not your tool of choice.

This one is amazing

https://github.com/Bleuje/processing-animations-code/tree/ma...

Thank you so much for this!

Some of these animations transported me back 20-25 years ago to the days when I would have Winamp cranking with its visualization plugins. Fun times.

Cool animations here.

Obligitory shoutout to ProjectM!

And butterchurn! Web-based.

MilkDrop 3 got released not that long ago and works on any audiosource. V2 was basically our digital fireplace in the 90s.

https://github.com/milkdrop2077/MilkDrop3

Thanks, appreciate it! I probably would've missed it. I still use Winamp and Milkdrop2 today and still have like hundreds of my own presets. Super excited to get into Milkdrop3 now, especially with multiple audio sources and this new "double preset" feature.

"MilkDrop 3.0 is a portable program that supports any audio source"

Unfortunately what they mean by "portable" is in the context of Windows only. :(

Is it compatible with WINE?

Me too, but I'm old enough to remember TV interstitials looking like that.

Here is an example of what they looked like.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=15WqxmKZbTc&t=189s

True that! Though with Pentium MMX turning on those WinAmp visualizations led to significant drop in system responsiveness that I don't do anything other than watch those visualisations when I turn them on. Simpler, fun times though.

Aaahh, AVS Society FTW! :)

Holy heck what I'd do to bring AVS back. The possibilities were endless... HOWEVER, I was with the Geiss/Milkdrop party XD

so Geiss vs AVS; much like the editor wars, but with visualisers. So cool back then.

i was thinking the same. cthugha where are you know?

we had a big glass lens we'd place on the monitor to project it onto a ceiling.

i picked the wrong decade to stop smoking dope

Those of us "of a certain age," may remember Todd Runtgren's Utopia Softworks Flowfazer screensaver.

He was an Apple Registered developer, and we'd see him walking around the WWDC, in the '90s.

Exactly what I thought!!

I was looking at the source to see if it was randomly generated or randomly selected from pre-generated animations (it is the latter) and saw this odd anyalytics tag:

    Script blocked by Cloudflare, check the site yourself.

And I have a few questions.

1. It requests the script from Google unconditionally.

2. `doNotTrack` is just hardcoded to false. My browser sends the header, so it isn't server-inserted (at least not in a way that works).

So what is it trying to do?

Indeed, all those animations are pre-rendered videos embedded in the page, which are then randomly selected. I find shadertoy [1] really impressive, given that those animations are calculated/rendered in real-time.

A while ago after being impressed by shadertoy I've built a website (now offline) with a shader as a background using Tree.js [2]. The website was showing caustics - constantly-changing ridges of light produced on the bottom of the pool/lake/sea when light passes through the waves (similar to [3]). People visiting it were always assuming those are pre-rendered videos and were genuinely surprised that their N-years old phone is capable of running that shader in real-time flawlessly.

1. https://www.shadertoy.com/browse (click Hot or Popular button to sort)

2. https://threejs.org/docs/#api/en/materials/ShaderMaterial

3. https://www.shadertoy.com/view/wlc3zr

Shadertoy is a blast, and if you use KDE, you can make your wallpaper use it[0]

0. https://github.com/y4my4my4m/kde-shader-wallpaper

just block the GA stuff

Of course this has all kinds of different animations, but it reminds me of Electric Sheep, a really cool fractal flame screensaver. You install it locally and can upvote/downvote different "sheep" to your liking

[1] https://electricsheep.org/

Since no one else asked... how is this done? Are there any specialized programs for this sort of graphical/visual programming? Or is this just a bunch of Python scripts using 3D/math/plot libs?

There are specialized programs, but there are also languages like Processing that are often used for computer art. Not sure what was used for these, however.

The site actually has some tutorials for creating these sorts of animations with a specific focus on perfectly looping gifs [1]. Looks like it's all done with Processing [2].

[0]: https://bleuje.com/tutorials/ [1]: https://processing.org/

Wow this is suprisingly accessible! How are people incorporating this aside from screensaver? That high contrast LCD screen from playdate would make a brilliant frame for these animations.

You semi-randomly try stuff. Iterate on what's cool (genetic selection).

Also study the code of other animations to learn the general ideas and patterns.

You can see a list of them, in chronological order, from the main site — click 'latest animations'[1]

[1] https://bleuje.com/animationsite/2023_1/

This is the kind of stuff I saw as a kid whenever I had a bad fever.

Night terrors for me when I was a tween.

Wow, memory unlocked. I think I took way too much Sudafed once and yeah this is what I saw in some sort of half dream/half awake state.

If you right click on desktop and choose your browser's version of "show controls" it gives a nice sense of the loop points ... some of them are insanely short!

Looking at this, I could see it being in some kind of movie as this thing that is hypnotizing the locale populace to do the bidding of some evil mastermind.

"Don't look at it, here, use these"

"Damn, we've arrived too late, he's too far gone"

"We'll have to resync the server's mainframe database to reroute the traffic so that it stops the flow of tcp's"

Edit: also the wormhole one needs the Dr Who theme music.

Weird, yesterday I tried to text this link to some relatives and it never showed up. We've tried a few variations and it seems every group message we send containing a bleuje . com link is blocked. I guess there's a filter somewhere...? (Android Messages using T-Mobile)

I am entirely way way way too high for that

EDIT: it's maddening that I can't save some of these!

Technically you can (licensing though needs to be checked). Just check/inspect the code of the page, look for video tag and see the source url, e.g. [0]

0. https://bleuje.com/mp4set/2021/2021_01.mp4

P.S. You can even check out how author's animations increase in complexity over time by changing year and month manually (or finding the full list of videos in one of the js files). Great work!

He has a full gallery on his website, this is just the random page.

https://bleuje.com/animationsite/

Reminds me of David Szakaly (davidope), who has a similar style in a lot of his loops. Can be searched for, but it seems like he's primarily active on Instagram, where the videos cannot be watched unless logged in.

Thanks for reminding me of him, as I used to follow him years ago on tumblr. Such a shame his account got hacked and 99% of his content was lost. https://dvdp.tumblr.com/post/616249201303666688/my-acc-has-b...

Besides him, I used to follow Pi-Slices, with a somewhat similar style: https://pislices.art/GIFS https://pi-slices.tumblr.com/archive

This would make for an awesome music visualization. Or a component of one.

Send in the LLMs!

I want to be able to say single words at it and see a visualization of: disco tango banana reptillian

That would make for an awesome password reminder!

Woaaw, amazing work. At some point I struggled with the dilemma: * clicking to discover a new animation * spending all my life contempling the current one

Been a while since I've played with Processing, and I never got so far as to make anything this impressive. Urge to dabble again...

Those are fabulous. I'm really impressed

Refresh the page for a new one each time.

Or click.

Thanks!

Or hit the Space bar.

Or wait a bit.

Just click on it

or go eat some boomers and come back

Or press K

Love it - reminds me of MC Escher. Some of these were incredibly creative.

XScreensaver did it better

Some of these look to be patterns of random patterns. Care to share?

Check out flow fields, eg.: https://tylerxhobbs.com/essays/2020/flow-fields

These are awesome.

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