Breaking Symmetry in Kaleidoscopic Effects

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Breaking Symmetry in Kaleidoscopic Effects

We’ve recently been discussing different approaches to building kaleidoscopic effects in Studio Artist. Two days ago we discussed symmetry vs breaking symmetry, and how breaking symmetry can lead to more organic looking effects that still maintain some of the perceptual trigger aspects introduced by symmetry in visual imagery.

Today’s post will continue this discussion by exploring some of the modulatable kaleidoscopic effects available via MSG processors. Modulation being used as a way to break symmetry in a kaleidoscopic (or other geometric warp) effect.

The 1st gallery image below shows the MSG Advanced Editor configured to build a simple modulatable kaleidoscopic effect.

Note that a single 3CKaleido_Mod processor is used to build the effect. As can be seen in the IO (input-output) connections shown in the 1st gallery image, this processor differs from the previously discussed 3CKaleido processor in that the 3CKaleido_Mod processor has an additional IN Mod Port. This input Port can be hooked up to any image stream, which will then be used to locally modulate the kaleidoscopic effect.

In this first example, we’re using the GSrc input image stream to do the modulation. Later in this post, we’ll show how to use another MSG processor that generates turbulent noise imagery to modulate the kaleidoscopic effect.

The 2nd gallery image above shows the Evolution Editor propagated with different mutated variations of this MSG preset. Note that while they maintain the symmetry effects associated with kaleidoscopic imagery, they do so in a much more organic way. Absolute reflection symmetry is broken in interesting ways locally. The symmetry breaking is caused by the modulation of the kaleidoscopic effect introduced by the In Mod Port and it’s associated image stream contents. Note that modulating with a flat grayscale image stream would not produce a noticeable effect.

Using a 2nd MSG Generator as a Modulator

As mentioned above, we could build a slightly more complicated MSG preset that uses a second processor that acts as a n image generator to build an image stream that is used for the kaleidoscopic modulation. The 1st gallery image below shows an effect generated using this kind of approach.

The 2nd and 3rd gallery images above show the IO (input-output) routing for the 2 processors used to build this second approach to modulatable kaleidoscopic effects. Note that the first processor is the GenAdvTurb processor, which generates a turbulent noise field as it’s output. The output of the GenAdvTurb processor is routed to a temporary image stream (Tmp Img).

The 2nd processor (3rd gallery image) uses the same IO routing as the original preset, except that the In Mod Port is connected to the Tmp Img stream (which contains the turbulent noise field image output of the GenAdvTurb processor).

The 4th gallery image above shows the Evolution Editor propagated with different mutated variations of this second MSG preset. Again, note that while they maintain the symmetry effects associated with kaleidoscopic imagery, they do so in a much more organic way. Absolute reflection symmetry is broken in interesting ways locally. Because the kaleidoscopic modulation is based on a noise field as opposed to the source image, the quality of the local modulation is less structured.

Extreme modulation of the first preset example can start to to build noticeable source feature detail into the modulation since it was based on a crude approximation of the source image luminance ( the GSrc image stream). Working with a modulator image derived from a controllable generator provides much more control and variability in the local symmetry breaking going on in the modulatable kaleidoscopic effect.

In our previous discussion of symmetry breaking and kaleidoscopic effects, we used recursive IO routing and multi-threading of the MSG processing to introduce symmetry breaking in the kaleidoscopic effect. In today’s post, we showed how we can use spatially variant modulation to break symmetry. This second approach has a more organic feel that the one discussed in our previous post 2 days ago.

Categories: MSG, Temporal Mode, Warping

Breaking Symmetry in Kaleidoscopic Effects

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