not long ago i was tackling again the problem of getting nice sync between visuals and audio and tried a bunch of different things. i made this tool to make manually syncing pretty efficient. it shows you the waveform or amplitude or other visualizations and you draw a curve on top of it with some nice controls for duplicating points and stuff. that still took much too long so then i tried some stuff with rendering out fft and other data to images and using graphics stuff i was more familiar with to process them. here's a pretty bad example of that.

anyhow what i wound up finding and using for the demo n-0505 is an awesome web service called echonest. it's crazy. you upload your mp3 with the music and it analyzes it for a bit then you can download xml data with tons of info you can sync to. the most useful by far is some data that tells you essentially how many beats per minute and the time of the first beat. that's covered like 99% of syncing for me as i set absolutely everything to start on beat indices or pulse with waves centered at the beats and things like that. suuuper simple!

i've been gathering up spare life seconds to experiment with some new procedural geometry
and fancy rendering. here are some highlights if you're interested:

okay nvscene 2008 was awesome! i'm almost fully recovered now from the many sleepless nights in san jose during the party. :) in the end the demo ryiinn, kirill, trace and i made tied asd's demo for 3rd place in the compo. not too shabby. :)

here's a video capture you can watch from demoscene.tv!

you can also download the full demo and rate it here: n-0505

i've posted a bunch of photos from the trip to my nvision 2008 photoset on flickr.

thanks so much to nvidia and the party organizers for the great experience! i really hope there will be an nvscene 2009. :)

it's the last day of nvscene - a demo party hosted by nvidia as part of their nvision event. it's been awesome! ryiinn and i got down here to san jose on saturday and immediately dived into nonstop work on the demo to get it finished. saturday and sunday were pretty much nothing but caffeine + junk food + demo demo demo. sunday night was cool as we met up with sceners in the nvscene hall before it opened and went out for a proper dinner. it was a lot of fun speculating on what productions would be released at the party.

monday was the start of nvision and the nvscene demo party and ryiinn and i were still very busy trying to finish our demo. we only got a couple hours of sleep and got up early to attend the seminar by iq of rgba. it was amazing and super inspiring. i've chatted with iq a lot on messenger so it was very cool to see his presentation and talk to him afterwards. he also hooked me up with a free copy of the escena.org demo dvd which features a bunch of demos i worked on. thanks iq! i wanted to make it to preacher's seminar but woke up too late. :(

monday night we stayed up the entire night finishing the demo and by the morning had it to a point we were pretty happy with and headed down to the hall to attend the seminars. there was a talk on 4ks by mentor then a super rad talk by chaos of farbrausch who went into lots of interesting details on the making of everything from fr-08 and kkrieger to debris. it was especially very cool to hear about his comments on the design of the werkkzeug stacking system. finally there was a cool presentation by navis though it was quite similar to his presentation from breakpoint.

at night on tuesday the 4ks and demos were shown on the crazy big screen and amazing sound system. the 4k compo was absolutely INSANE. there were soooo many good productions. my favorite was texas - it was mindblowing and loooked soooo good on the big screen. the demo compo started off a little weak in comparison to the amazing 4ks but picked up at the end. the northern dragons demo was very cool to see since i had seen some work in progress on it from guybrush and was looking forward to seeing all the cool escher inspired scenes and effects. ryiinn and i were super nervous about how the demo we presented would look on the bigscreen and be received by the audience. when it came on though i felt a lot better and had fun watching it on the big screen. it was especially cool when the sequence of blobs subdividing at an exponential rate got applause. :) i had super high expectations for the asd demo and have to admit i was a bit disappointed as it was very much like metamorphosis (of course being a sequel) and i kept waiting for it to break out of its 2d panning. my favorite demo of the compo was stargazer which was just gorgeous! after the compos we went out for dinner with other sceners and then to rvscene where i had a lot of fun chatting with trixter, chaos, and preacher.

right now ryiinn and i are in the hall watching bonzaj of plastic talk about linger in the shadows and trolling pouet as we wait for the award ceremony. more reportage and photos to come, stay tuned! ;)

eek only a couple weeks left until nvidia's demoparty! i really gotta stop messing around with random experimentation and focus on making a demo. :P so since i may not be getting back to these for awhile here are some images of stringing some soft organic blobbies on a spiky armature