„Sofia Forms“ follow-up: Creative coding

At the recent „Sofia Forms“ conference, I gave a talk about my visual effect (done in C++ & OpenGL) called Multiscale Desmoothing.

I’m now doing a follow-up event at init Lab, to further explore the effect with you guys – to discuss its inner workings.

For those of you who haven’t seen it, you can check the slides here:

https://experiments.stefanteaches.eu/multiscale_desmoothing.pptx

… and an old version of the effect here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9D50-l_aL5U

Some aspects that might be interesting to you:
– how to compute derivatives in a 2D array (in a computer) and what does that even mean
– What these derivatives can be used for
– Why a „blur, contrast, blur, contrast“ loop actually produces the „progressively smoother silhouette“ effect you saw (https://experiments.stefanteaches.eu/glass-modeling/)
– How (and why) to estimate the curvature (of the isoline) at a given pixel in an image
– How to send a „Compute a bunch of pixels“ task to the videocard (for crazy-fast computation) in one line of code (using my tiny compute-on-videocard „framework“)

It will also be hands-on:
– You can suggest changes/improvements and we can try them out together
– If you know some basic C++, you can experiment with my tiny compute-framework to pump out some awesome effects in very few lines of code. I’ll help you with that. (Yes it works on Linux and Win; possibly Mac too)

P.S. The effect looks snazzier now and it reacts to music too!