May 02

TV Antenna

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Is it hard to make a TV antenna?

You need a coaxial cable (to connect it to TV), a foam board and a piece of wire.

Schematics is very simple – you make a ring out of the wire, squish it and attach coaxial outer wire to one side and the central wire to the other side.

face_view

Plug it to TV and enjoy.

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Jun 30

Shpanalet

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How do I explain it?

Do you know BurningMan?

There is early team sport&fun competition on a peninsula I Puget Sound (it was in other areas before, but close to Seattle in the state of Washington)

Here is the link: drowa.org

Sorry, it is all in Russian.
This year they added BurningMan-like theme.

We had to come up with something that is going on in a neighborhood using LEDs.

My theme was – three bullies kicked Alien out and occupied the saucer.

Here is the early concept:

shpanalet_concept

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Nov 11

Smoke in Natron

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When I first tried Natron, I was frustrated with inability to use particle effects like smoke.
It took me a while to figure it out. But finally I have a solution!
natron_smoke

Here is step-by-step instruction:
1. Install Natron from natron.fr
2. Install community plugins from github.com/NatronVFX/natron-plugins
3. Run Natron, add node “Shadertoy” from “Filter” section
4. In the ShaderToy property click on “Image Shader”. It will expand a large section of parameters.
5. In “Load From Preset” select something (for example, “Bubbles”) to make sure it works (connect “ShaderToy” node output to “Viewer” input, of course)
6. Now go to shadertoy.com and search for “Smoke” (or whatever effect you need). Click on it. Copy the source (in C-like language) from the window on the right
7. Back in Natron, select in “Load From Preset” “No Preset”, clean up the Source window and copy there the code.
8. It will fail! You need to go through the code and replace iTime with iGlobalTime and also texture with texture2D. there might be no “texture”, but for sure there will be iTime.
9. Compile! The “Compile button looks like it is disabled, but it works indeed!
10. It works? Great! Now make it permanently available! Go to C:\Program Files\INRIA\Natron-2.3.2\Plugins\OFX\Natron\Shadertoy.ofx.bundle\Contents\Resources\presets\default\ and create a file with extension .glsl, like myeffect.glsl
11. Edit C:\Program Files\INRIA\Natron-2.3.2\Plugins\OFX\Natron\Shadertoy.ofx.bundle\Contents\Resources\presets\default\Shadertoy.txt – add a line
“My Effect” “myeffect.glsl”
It is easy to group items. Use this instead:
“My Effects/MyEffect” “myeffect.glsl”
12. Restart Natron and enjoy!

Feb 12

CityLandscapeGenerator

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This is software project.

It generates moving city landscape. With it, I can make movies like this (Click on the image to watch on YouTube):

Movie Screenshot

Here you can download the Landscape Generator executable for .NET (it runs on Windows. I did not try to run in on Linux with Mono but it might just run):

CityLandscape.exe

If you are paranoid and do not trust me, because I’m just some random person on the Internet (which is very reasonable), please instead download the sources from GitHub, review them for potential threats, and compile. They are in C#.

Source Codes

Oct 22

Spiderweb

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My 2016 Halloween project: Spiderwebnight

How was it done? Watch the video:

TimeLapse video

Was it a successful project? Well, not quite. The rope supposed to be “glow in the dark”. And it does glow. Immediately after being exposed to some strong light. But sun set way too slowly :( I tried blacklight and camera flash, but they do not produce enough power for the whole spiderweb to glow. I can make a little piece glowing, but that’s no fun. But I like how it turns pink in the flash light. And it looks cool enough even without glowing.