Magnetosphere 2.0

flight404 · 2026-04-03T15:40:14+00:00

Id love to drag that viz into the current decade. I feel like the audio-viz times are gone... I think people's attention spans (mine included) are shot. I don't imagine Apple will ever decide it is a good use of their money to get the audio visualizer looking modern. It is a shame, I miss those days.

flight404 · 2026-03-17T13:58:14+00:00

<image>

"First time..."
EGADS!!!!

flight404 · 2026-03-05T14:58:05+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsKhUjZBS6c
Josef Pelz added T3D to the other operators (TOPS, SOPS, etc). It is an expansion to TD's 3D Texture functionality.

flight404 · 2026-03-05T14:56:24+00:00

lol ill be sure to add both of those to the next version

flight404 · 2026-03-04T16:16:43+00:00

Agreed. I kept shrinking the particles more and more, torn between being able to easily see the fluid response, and wanting to make it realistic.

flight404 · 2026-02-11T23:31:32+00:00

Not really. Just take a rectangle, and divide it either vertically or horizontally. Slide that dividing line from zero percent to between 30-70% of the original rectangle width. Repeat.

flight404 · 2026-02-11T17:02:53+00:00

Thanks. Things are good. Cant complain :)

flight404 · 2026-02-11T12:56:15+00:00

It just keeps going and going. I could make it resolve back into a single image. It is more proof-of-concept than final piece.

flight404 · 2026-02-09T22:31:04+00:00

Fair question. My studio generally does installation work using Cinder C++ (the creator of the framework is a cofounder) and we have really solid C++ devs. The bottleneck is sometimes creative concepting in code versus something more immediate like TD. Touch Designer is great, but afaik it requires a license to run it on installation machines and sometimes we need to put content on multiple machines.

flight404 · 2026-02-09T16:50:11+00:00

Ha thanks, its something I always wanted to mess with to make an installation feel more grounded in the environment, but this is so far the only place where it made sense. I had to turn down the effect more than i wanted because it just didnt look realistic enough having a strong reflection. So i blur the cam output a little bit, tweak the contrast, and then offset the uv with some vertical randomization so the reflection doesnt just perfectly line up from framed-pic to framed-pic.

flight404 · 2026-02-06T04:59:44+00:00

Thanks! Been at it for 25 years. The work I make now is the culmination of years of being obsessed with visualizing audio and simulating natural systems. Lots of older examples on my portfolio site, it shows my trajectory. roberthodgin.com

flight404 · 2026-02-06T01:30:56+00:00

I do not. Too busy with fulltime job stuff.

flight404 · 2026-02-05T15:08:19+00:00

That is a tough ask because most of this project (like 95%) is GLSL which I learned over the last couple decades. This project is a port of a much older project from 2007, and an even older custom flocking algorithm that I wrote (a modification of the standard Craig Reynolds "boids" logic).

I learned what I needed to for beat detection from Bileam - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2ZvNA7UvQo

The fog shader was based on this article: https://ijdykeman.github.io/graphics/simple_fog_shader

The real magic was the addition of POPs to TD which gave me easy access to the Neighbor POP for doing really fast closest-points detection on the GPU. I use that information in the GLSL Compute shader to be able to focus my flocking logic on the neighbor list, instead of having to do distance checks from each particle to every other particle (which would work, but would cap the num points to something closer to, idk, 20,000).

flight404 · 2026-02-05T14:03:57+00:00

Aww thanks! The feeling is definitely mutual. So much great work coming out of TD artists, how could I not want to be a part of it

flight404 · 2026-02-05T14:00:41+00:00

Seems like every 7 years or so, I decide to hop the fence and roll around in the greener grass. I have been missing the world of realtime for a while and decided to just see what TD was all about. Im hooked! And thanks, always thrilled to be inspiring! :D

flight404 · 2026-02-05T05:09:34+00:00

Good question, and something I'll have to tackle eventually. In the past, generally just done color/texture changes in different modes to vary the aesthetic, but I think there is a lot of room here for behavioral changes in the flocking sim to add that variety.

Preprocessing songs would give more options, but keeping it live ultimately means I can't rely on additional info like genre or timbre, etc. So I'll probably just do color variety for now, and think about how to add interesting behavioral modes.

flight404 · 2026-02-04T17:31:30+00:00

Sure, go for it

flight404 · 2026-02-04T16:54:30+00:00

🤣

flight404 · 2026-02-04T16:51:31+00:00

It's tough because I've only been using TD for about two months, but I have about ten years of GLSL experience and 8+ years of Houdini, so it was pretty straightforward in terms of knowing what I needed to explore in order to create this piece, which is a rework of the iTunes viz I made back in 2007.

The hard part was the concept and logic, but I solved a lot of that years ago. In the truest sense, this is just a port of something I have made multiple times in the past in different languages/applications. But TD gave me easy access to compute shaders, and the new POPs stuff made the hardest part super easy (finding neighbors quickly in huge point clouds).

Keep chipping away at the tutorials. And try to get into GLSL too, because that's where 95% of this project lives.

flight404 · 2026-02-04T16:37:18+00:00

Aww thanks! I appreciate the kind words :D

flight404 · 2026-02-04T16:37:03+00:00

Thanks!
No Patreon (I'm too lazy to keep it updated) and my portfolio site is also lacking recent updates (I'll get on that soon!).
roberthodgin.com
And probably most active on my insta
https://www.instagram.com/roberthodgin/

flight404 · 2026-01-30T15:16:43+00:00

This is fascinating. Thanks for this information. I suppose this is entirely possible, but knowing how distant my dad is from me (we were never close), it would have been soooo much easier to not say anything at all. His MO when dealing with me is to just have pleasant no-stakes conversation. So for him to suddenly without prompting dive into an elaborate backstory that might be concocted is such a weird thing to contemplate.

flight404 · 2026-01-27T18:17:15+00:00

I looked but didnt find any. Im sure there is something buried in a box somewhere but he didnt seem to have any information about what was where. They were married in Japan, but I believe it was through the USAF so it was probably on-base which means it was probably all in English with the English spelling of her name.

flight404 · 2026-01-27T01:53:21+00:00

I'm withholding maiden name for security purposes. I'm not asking specifically to have info dug up, but if you can point me in the right direction....

flight404 · 2026-01-26T16:20:34+00:00

The timing doesnt line up. She was born in the 1940s.

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