omino pixel blog

My partner (of the non-business variety) recently built a beautiful oversized kaleidoscope for part of an artistic installation. Here’s a picture taken from within:

I can’t seem to find a picture of the device itself, but it stands about 3 feet tall, a foot across. With cardboard mock wrought-iron corners. And fused glass inserts. And a velvet-lined eyepiece. Anyway, I got to wondering about simulating kaleidoscopes. After Effects ships with CC Kaleida, which is a little bit nifty, but it only does arrangements of square mirrors. I wanted more flexibility. Actually, I wanted complete flexibility. So, I wrote omino kaleidoscope.

Its features include:

• Use any path to define a set of mirrors
• Set the shininess of the mirrors, so successive reflections may be dimmer
• Set a distortion amount, similar to tilting the mirrors a bit
• Set the number of reflections (fewer will render faster, but with less expanse)
• …and a few futz values that change some numbers, in the, the, you know, the math, that make it become more cool.

And here’s a demonstration of omino kaleidoscope:

This will be available in the next, soon, upcoming (!) release of the omino after effects suite.

To foster a bit of post-holiday spirit, and promote safe food-handling all year round, I thought I’d try to animate something like salmonella bacteria. Salmonella can grow on turkey, and can survive months in plain water at room temperature, and looks like this:

So, in After Effects, I made some that are slightly stylized.

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A Photoshop script was composed and executed to perform Gaussian blur. Over and over. And over. Random characters are stamped from time to time. A slightly cool effect is achieved!

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I was going to write a short post about using After Effects expressions to capture the “feel” of machines. But I got so distracted by this simple example I put together:

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