I’m working on some sketches and visual styles for Flow a project with Georgie Pinn. The aim is to create images that evoke different states of water and emotion for an interactive audiovisual work.

This sketch is inspired by the use of displacement in Crystal Jow’s tutorial New Grammar of Ornament in TouchDesigner Pt. 2. I realised I could use a similar technique with tiled circles to create a pattern that would look similar to the reflections in a pool or clear body of water.

I wanted to experiment using TOPs to make use of the Nvidia RTX4080 in my laptop. This video is made from two circles that are tiled and displaced with noise and a variety of image processing. Starting with the Nvidia background TOP I processed the video in to add the person into the image with displacement from a combination of the two circle noise displacements. The video ran easily on my laptop at 1920 x 1080 60fps.

Things To Do Next

• Add control of the displacement parameters with the user velocity.
• Detect the proximity of two people and effect the colour as they get close.
• Test with multiple people.
• Add parts of the face when close to the camera – like dipping your face in a pool (from underwater).
• play with colour and diffraction/rgb split.

Sketches

This video documents the style experiments and development.

Early experiment: