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PACK ⬕ Tracer Freq
🕑 Added 2025-02-01 15:32:16 +0000 UTCTORRENT DOWNLOAD
This pack contains 1,963 VJ loops (12 GB)
Let's trace out some intricate patterns, like Tron bikes on caffeine. Definitely inspired by all those hours I spent jamming with the NestDrop "Drawing" presets. But the flooding simulation techniques that I know of are much too slow for creative experimentation and so I've been sitting on the idea for this VJ pack for a few years. But recently I stumbled across the AutoFill v2 plugin for After Effects and it's just the tool that I've been waiting for.
What's interesting about AutoFill is that it automatically generates a flow map of a given image by using either the alpha channel or RGB channels. But I used the alpha channel technique so that I have better control over it. It is so nice to play with a tool that has clearly been designed with care and freedom for artist experimentation. After doing some experiments I learned that the line width and also opacity value will affect its tracing speed, which opened up some really nice movement variation that I could lean on via happy accidents. Since I was frequently tracing out very thin lines, the most critical attribute was setting Border Expand to 1. And since I wanted the tracing to skip over organically to lines which were in close proximity, I changed the Border Strength to 10%. From there I could set anywhere from 1 to 5 different Growth Source points onto the canvas and then tweak the Growth Speed as needed. Or for the "Random" scenes I changed the Growth Source to Noise instead and adjusted the Evolution to effectively act like a Seed attribute. Interestingly I was using this FX in a somewhat unconventional way since it was designed for revealing an image in a sexy way, but I just wanted to see the tracing animation. Since I did this experimentation right at the beginning of this project, I saved these settings into an AE preset so that I could experiment with loads of different images and quickly see results on a comp by comp basis.
From there I collected a whole bunch of images that I could jam with. I curated a wide range of images such as line drawings by Waclaw Szpakowski, my Vector Recursion Workbench artwork, my abstract line drawings, Fleen generative art, motherboard photos, and Escher AI renders. A while back I saw the beautiful handdrawn line drawings of Waclaw Szpakowski (1883-1973) on Hacker News and saved it knowing it would come in handy someday. In trying to dig up the source for those line drawings, I stumbled across the Fleen Forsythia app and a geometric imagery collection generated using the app. Many thanks to John Greene and Svjatoslav Agejenko for open-sourcing this incredible collection of images! Also it was satisfying to revisit the Escher AI renders that I made for the Mask Hypno VJ pack and go through all 48,907 images and select the best 757 images that would work nicely for this technique.
At first I was going to cut out each image in Photoshop, but then I realized that it was highly advantageous to generate the alpha channel in After Effects and tweak it after seeing how the AutoFill FX simulations reacted to it. Since I was dealing with thousands of comps I had to carefully plan out an FX stack that I could then use for each image to generate an alpha channel. I ended up with the following FX stack: Tint >>> Levels >>> Channel Combiner (from: max RGB / to: alpha) >>> Fill (black). This approach allowed me to simply tweak the Levels so that I could change the gradients of the alpha channel, which in turn affected the flowmap of the AutoFill FX. This gave me the freedom to work very quickly and so I just kept churning out tons of scene variations... I wasn't even keeping track until I started the render and realized that I had created 1,934 unique scenes in AE. OMG BBQ! I went overboard and got lost in the process, which is a good sign. In hindsight it's interesting to see just how much a streamlined approach can allow me to spread my wings and just focus on being creative.
With all of those AE solo scenes created, then I brought the theme variations together into a "collage" comp and staggered the solo scenes so that a new scene started every 5 seconds. This means that the solo scenes frequently overlap in time and it makes for a different look. I made these collage comps for the VJs that don't want to bother with the super short solo scenes and just want a long video to jam with. Also I realized that the collage comps would look real juicy with some slitscan FX applied and so I rendered those out at the last minute.
Originally I envisioned these visuals would be used as one-shot overlays. But then I created so many different variations that have gone in new directions. So I think these visuals are also ideal for projection mapping, particularly the "FleenHexSolo" scenes since the hexagon shape perfectly matches up to a cube viewed in an isometric perspective. Also I think they would work really nicely on those super long LED ceiling panels that are becoming commonplace in clubs. The traceroute has been initiated!
