omino pixel blog

If you tried to download the Windows version of the Omino After Effects Suite and had a negative experience: Please accept my apologies. I jumped the gun on the “release”. Lessons learned (something about DLL’s and testing, thanks).

On the plus side: http://omino.com/sw/ominoAeSuite/ has the fixed download. Confirmed to download and run on 3, count ’em, 3 computers other than my own.

(The only issues were with download/unzip; once running, they are reliable and stable. More stable than Particle Playground ha ha.)

Especial thanks to Mike K at Muonics for dragging me kicking and writhing into the necessary knowledge of manifests, linker choices.

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.