vimeo.

I feel slightly dirty about this, but I’ve joined vimeo. Did I suddenly get overcome by an urge to get a bit more web2.0, you ask? No, it’s because I had to in order to submit something to the Victoria&Albert Museum’s Decode:Recode gallery. The idea being: you take their ident piece as source code, mess with it and send it back to them.

We were looking at the other entries a couple of weeks ago, and several things struck us: 1. most of them didn’t change the code at all except for messing with the colours; 2. the colours were a bit.. dutch to start with; 3. the nicer ones were generally done with AfterEffects messing with the video, not running realtime. It felt like it was time the demoscene struck back and offered an education on the fine art of realtime graphics. So, that’s what we did. Paul offered up a 512 byte intro done on the spectrum, and I made something for high end PCs. Very, very high end PCs.

The piece uses a particle system generated off a voxelised version of their logo (the only thing I preserved from the original), rendered as 250,000 cubes and affected by various swarming modifiers, and then using a crafty ambient occlusion / radiosity tracer using raycasts through a voxel set version of the particle system. Insert the usual lighting + shadows, cameras, fine selected colours (not dutch!) and post processing effects here, and we’re done. A few hours work well spent.

Anyway. Check the video on Vimeo here, and check my Vimeo page here. Now I’ve got it, I might as well use it. I’m afraid the encoding on the vimeo video is terrible, but there’s a high quality version on download – I might upload a proper one at some point if anyone wants it.

Update: My Decode:Recode made it into the Metro newspaper in the UK! I’ve uploaded a scan here.