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david van brink // Sun 2008.02.3 00:07 // {after effects}

Kaleidoscope Plugin

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:

glasswaterscope

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.

Blueprinty Kaleido

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.

2 comments
jimmy // Tue 2008.08.5 08:498:49 am

hello
I’m having trouble getting these plug ins to show up in after effets do you know how to get them to appear?

david van brink // Tue 2008.08.5 17:235:23 pm

You should just download the right ones (windows or mac) and place the folder into your after effects “Plugins” folder…

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