Animata with Grumonium Processing Library

Before I proceed with this post, I would like to put a few acknowledgements and small history path of events that have lead me onto this exploration. Just over a month ago, I have come across Animata – open source real-time animation software, designed to create animations, interactive background projections for concerts, theatre and dance performances. My excitement of discovery lead me to share the news with my good friends at Create Digital Motion (Peter Kirn and Jaymis Loveday) who have followed up with 3D Animation, Made Real-Time: Open-Source Animata for Mac, Windows post. That same CDM post was shortly found by Michael Forrest who blogged about that discovery on his Homebrew Adventures post as seen below.

Sometimes the software you can buy isn’t enough. I spent a few years playing in bands and always wanted to use samples to bring some more life into the sound. But it always felt so disembodied and strange to have sounds coming from nowhere when it was obvious what was coming from the guitars or drums. So I conceived this idea of a ‘virtual band’. This would give form to the weird and wonderful sounds possible through audio synthesis and processing, and could inject a lot of interest into live performances. Over the years I have tried to realise this vision in many different ways. I’ve created models with Poser and 3DS Max, I’ve written MIDI responsive software in Director, I’ve made sample players in Flash, but there was always too much latency, or 3D modelling, or rendering or… well … non-realtime problems, and I always ended up putting the idea on the back burner. Then, a couple of weeks ago, Create Digital Motion blogged about Animata. An open source animation tool with a really simple concept at its core, and the ability to do exactly what I’ve wanted to do all these years, with a fast workflow, flexibly, and in realtime. So I got to work.

What has followed from this development I have recently found by stumbling upon Michael Forrest blog via Animata Mailing List.

I’d already used Max/MSP for a project but found it incredibly unwieldy when arrays were necessary. I’ve attempted to use Processing for a complex commercial project and learned that doing everything within Processing can lead to a lot of problems. I’ve used the Processing libraries in pure Java but found this was too much of a sacrifice in terms of sharing code and exporting applications. So this time I decided to make libraries for Processing with a bit of scripting to bind little projects together within the Processing IDE. So I built a library for the Korg MicroKontrol (and have some others underway), I got the source code for Animata to compile so I could make changes, I did some drawings, I pulled out some of the ideas I’d had earlier in the year for visuals, and I slapped it all together to make what you see in the videos below.

Turns out something that seemed quite simple in my head is gargantuan in terms of implementation complexity, but – well – here it is. Working.

Homebrew Adventures from Michael Forrest on Vimeo.

Homebrew Adventures – demo from Michael Forrest on Vimeo.