Interstellar Sugar - Suryummy from Suryummy on Vimeo.

Friend of CDMo Suryummy shares this audiovisual motion sequence, imagining what the world would be like if you cooked … in … outer space.

Good stuff. And no, The Frugal Gourmet hasn’t been dropping acid. (Suryummy does suggest that this could be Bowie with a cooking show, which I like.) But Suryummy does share his tools:

• Maya
• Adobe CS3
• Particular
• Ableton Live
• Native Instruments Reaktor
• Native Instruments Absynth

Tasty. Keep those videos from vimeo (and elsewhere) coming.

At some point we need to go over what a workflow would be like doing this kind of thing in a live tool like Processing. It’s tricky, and of course necessitates some sacrifices in the visual category to allow for real-time performance – but it can be rewarding. (And there’s no saying you can’t do both.)

I was a bit remiss in not contextualizing Martin Böttger’s work with his other generative 3D forms. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the potential of 3D – not because I’m especially talented with it, quite the opposite. I’m drawn to the expressiveness of 3D the way someone longs to play a cello. Martin has done some great stuff in making 3D forms in Processing, as well as in actual physical space. No fancy 3D printers here – think folded paper and hand-made installations. I imagine this would be a great way to learn coding in 3D, to actually do more work with physical objects. I’m teaching up at MassArt this summer, so maybe we’ll get to experiment with this a bit if students want to go that direction.

http://www.flickr.com/people/tsaworks/

There’s lots of good stuff in Martin’s Flickr feed, and as always, I thoroughly enjoy seeing things in various states of completion – like looking through sketchbooks.

If you’ve got some 3D modeling / generative work you’d like to share, feel free to drop us a line!

TRACTOR from tsaworks_martin Böttger on Vimeo.

Composer/electronic musician Bruno Dias sends us his latest collaboration, with visualist Martin Bottger. It was a distance collaboration – so just the kind of thing you could be working on with musicians and visualists you know. Bruno writes:

We never had the opportunity to meet face-to-face and this work was carried along the last couples months with Martin working on the visual side in Maya and then After Effects in Berlin and me developing the sound narrative that would then drive the visuals one here in London. I worked on sound using as main tools Ableton Live and its sampler, NI Reaktor, NI Absynth and Logic/Pro Tools for post-production.

This is just the sort of thing you could do pre-rendered in this way, then adapt for real-time use, just as musicians routinely do a “studio” version and then rework it for live.(You might even export OBJ models from Maya and pull them into an environment like Processing, Jitter, or vvvv, if you have the savvy – or use a VJ app to remix, if that’s more your speed.) So, Martin and Bruno, you can take that as a subtle hint for your next step, coming from a real-time evangelist.

I love the description of the, um, fourth-dimensional tractor (maybe it’s my childhood in Louisville, Kentucky spent visiting the huge annual farm equipment show – seriously):