omino pixel blog

(After some back and forth regarding broken DLLs on our release two weeks back…)

By popular demand, the Omino Suite including Kaleidoscope and Snake is now available for both Mac OS X and Windows.

Notes for release 2.1 are:

• Available for Windows and Mac OS X
• Works on AE CS6 and Later
• Installed manually by dragging
• Kaleidoscope speedup with multithreads
• Snake rendering errors with tiny holes substantially reduced
• Minor parameter name changes (old projects still work fine)

Get it at the first link on the download page.

How To Install

In the zip file are two folders, one for Mac OS X, and one for Windows. Drag the appropriate folder as shown below.

Any problems (or feature requests, of course) please comment or email me, poly@omino.com. Enjoy!

Omino Plug-in Suite has been updated!

Most importantly… it installs correctly for AE CS6. (*yawn*. Sorry for the delay.)

Put most excitingly, scripts for omino_python now let you name the parameters. Earlier versions just named parameters like “float 0″ and “color 2″. Now, each script can define the names of the parameters it uses.

Before:

Which is a bit overwhelming. Most of those parameters don’t do anything.

But now, by including a second callback ompy_params(d), you can show only the parameters you use, named as you like:

def ompy_main(c):
    ctx = c.layer_out_context
    ctx.set_source_rgb(c.colors[0].r, c.colors[0].g, c.colors[0].b)
    ctx.move_to(c.points[0].x, c.points[0].y)
    ctx.set_font_size(c.floats[0])
    ctx.rotate(c.floats[1] / 57.29577951)
    ctx.show_text(str(c.floats[2]))

def ompy_params(d):
    d.floatDescs[0].name = "font size"
    d.floatDescs[1].name = "rotation"
    d.floatDescs[2].name = "value to print"
    d.pointDescs[0].name = "print position"
    d.colorDescs[0].name = "print color"

Produces:

Download the Omino Plug-in Suite (for Mac OS X only, alas) absolutely free at Omino.

For amusement purposes only… after importing a MIDI file as keyframes (see earlier post), I rendered it back out using After Effects as a synthesizer, with the provided Tone audio effect.

This was done by setting the Tone frequency expressions to reconstruct the appropriate musical pitch:

on = effect("ch_1_vel")("Slider").value ? 1 : 0;
note = effect("ch_1_pitch")("Slider");
on * 440 * Math.pow(2, (note-57)/12)

You could change 12 to something else, to hear it performed in some alternate equal-tempered scale. 8 and 17 sound kind-of interesting…

And here’s the self-contained CS5 project to download.

A quick note about one of the plug-ins in the omino suite: Omino Snake!

It was written late one night for a specific purpose. I was doing some promotional animations for my friends’ Science Tarot deck, and got to “High Priestess, Benzene Dream” in which Friedrich August Kekule von Stradonitz dreams of a snake eating its tail. And this was the mystery of the benzene ring-shaped molecule.

I wanted the snake to follow along a path. So, Omino Snake wraps any layer along a mask path, like so:

The results can be a little bit “chunky”; Omino Snake just dices the source image into thin triangles and spreads them out. You can adjust the “draw step” parameter to step in smaller amounts to help smooth it.

You could do the same thing, more or less, by animating with the Puppet tool, but it would be a bit tedious.

And here’s a little demo of it in action.