Today’s post continues our examination of Rutt Etra style processing effects. As we mentioned yesterday, the Rutt Etra video synthesizer was an influential early analog video synthesizer built in the 70s. The Rutt Etra style is based on modulating video scan lines, so you can think of it as a kind of displacement mapping effect.
In yesterday’s post we discussed how to configure the paint synthesizer to build a Rutt Etra style vector paint effect. Today we’ll look at using a MSG processor to generate the self-modulating displacement mapping effect shown above.
The effect shown above was created using a single RGB_DisplaceMod2D1 processor. The first 2 control panels below show the IO (input-output) routing and the editable parameters settings used for this effect.
Here is the preset MsgDisplace_RuttEtraEfx1.msg
The green and red input color channel image streams (G Src, R Src) are used as modulaiton inputs to the In Mod and In Mod2 ports for the RGB_DisplaceMod2D1 processor. So the RGB_DisplaceMod2D1 processor is displacement mapping the color input image to the effect, with the displacement mapping being self modulated by those 2 color channels.
The 2nd gallery image above shows the parameter values used for the effect above. Note that a Background setting of 1 initially sets the output image streams to full black and then overlays the displacement mapping effect on top of the black background. A Background setting of 0 will just overlay the processor’s effect output on top of the input color channels. So you could use a Background setting of 0 for subsequent RGB_DisplaceMod2D1 processors if you wanted to stack multiple instances of the effect on top of each other, or overlay the effect output on some other generated image.
The 1 and 2 Algorithm settings are the best match for generating a Rutt Etra style displacement mapping effect. The 0 Algorithm setting looks more like a conventional displacement mapping effect as opposed to a Rutt Etra scan line displacement mapping effect.
Note that a Triangle temporal generator is attached to the H Offset parameter. If you run the MSG preset in loop action mode it will self animate with a horizontal back and forth sweeping effect.
The 3rd control panel shows some mutated variations of this Rutt Etra style MSG displacement mapping effect generated in the Evolution Editor.
You could use this MSG preset in a PASeq with additional processing steps, or add on additional MSG processors to the MSG preset, if you want to create artistic variations of the initial simple point cloud scan line displacement mapping effect.
