Organic Complexity and Modulated Kaleidoscopic Effects

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Organic Complexity and Modulated Kaleidoscopic…

Organic patterns in nature are oftentimes balance symmetry making an symmetry breaking. The interaction of the 2 opposing symmetry making and breaking forces give organic patterns a visual complexity missing in artificial images that have pure mathematical symmetry. There are a number of different MSG processors that use internal modulation to make and break geometric symmetry transformation. Today we’ll take a look at a simple modulated kaleidoscopic source processing effect.

The modulated kaleidoscopic effect shown at the top of the post was created with the MSG preset shown below in screen shots of the MSG Advanced Editor. The gallery images show off the different IO (input-output) connections associated with the MSG preset here 6-17-.msg

This MSG preset works by first building up a black and white textural modulation pattern in the Tmp Img image stream. The SetToValue and 2 Angular Gradient processors are used to build up the modulation pattern. The Tmp Img stream is then used as the input to the 3C Kaleido_Mod processor’s In Mod port.

The textural pattern in the Tmp Img image stream acts to locally modulate the kaleidoscopic symmetry effect generated by the 3C Kaleido_Mod processor, which is processing the source image. The locally variant modulation of the kaleidoscopic effect acts to locally break symmetry. So the effect output has global kaleidoscopic symmetry that is broken locally. This tension between global symmetry and local symmetry breaking gives the effect’s output a more natural organic appearance.

If you turn off the 2 Angular Gradient processors you can generate a pure kaleidoscopic effect with no symmetry breaking (since the modulation image stream is just a flat gray image when you do this).

Note that the mathematically pure kaleidoscopic symmetry effect when you turn off the symmetry breaking modulation leads to an image that appears more artificial and less organic looking.

An easy way to generate different variations of this effect is to mutate the MSG preset in the Evolution Editor. To do this just click on the MSG preview image in the MSG Advanced Editor. This will propagate mutated variants of the MSG preset you are editing into the preview cells of the Evolution Editor.

Clicking any of the Evolution Editor’s preview cells will mutate new previews based on the cell you clicked, and the preset associated with the cell you clicked will be placed in the MSG Advanced Editor.

Category: MSG

Tags: kaleidoscope symmetry

Organic Complexity and Modulated Kaleidoscopic Effects

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