Last year I got fairly obsessed with distance estimation (DE) fractals. Recently a few developments in that field have rekindled my interest in the whole phenomenon. Most of the people playing around with the Mandelbulb and it’s variants back in early 2010 were either mathematicians or graphics programmers, and while there were some technically impressive [...]
Author Archives: Andrew Caudwell
Show Your True Colours
This last week saw the release of fairly significant update to Gource – replacing the out dated, 3DFX-era rendering code, with something a bit more modern, utilizing more recent OpenGL features like GLSL pixel shaders and VBOs. A lot of the improvements are under the hood, but the first thing you’ll probably notice is the [...]
New Zealand Open Source Awards
I discovered today that Gource is a finalist in the Contributor category for the NZOSA awards. Exciting stuff! A full list of nominations is here. I’m currently taking a working holiday to make some progress on a short film presentation of Gource for the Onward!. Update: here’s the video presented at Onward!: Craig Anslow presented [...]
Life is Strange
Here is my tribute to a fascinating new fractal I talked about in an earlier post, the Mandelbulb. (Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3x4uJJqs_w) The music in the video is ‘Life is strange (trance remix)’ by darkangell. I recorded the scenes using my work in progress Mandelbulb Viewer/Fly through builder application (which is on my github, if you’re curious). [...]
New Logstalgia Released
I’ve just released a new version of Logstalgia, my website access log visualization that looks a bit like Pong if only it had been created by Jeff Minter. Logstalgia is also referred to as ApachePong (referring to both the Apache Web Server and Pong) which is a much better name, but also covered by multiple [...]
Linux.Conf.Au 2010
Last week I attended Linux Conf Australia, the annual conference for all things Open Source down under, this year held in Wellington, New Zealand, the city where I live. I was very lucky to get the opportunity to organize some of the displays at the conference. An application developed for the conference displayed information such [...]
Strange Alien Vistas
I’ve been messing around with a new fractal discovered only a few months ago dubbed The Mandelbulb. It has similar interesting visual properties to its forebear, the Mandelbrot fractal, but in three dimensions, which hadn’t been achieved until now. Here are a few non-typical renderings of the Mandelbulb taken very close to the surface that [...]
Gource in Bloom
My earlier experiment with Bloom (I am tempted to call it Gourceian Blur) has lead to a new effect/feature in Gource. (Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjUuAuBcoqs) The bloom effect is achieved by blending radial gradients with each other additively. You can do a high quality version by drawing a perfect radial gradient with a Shader, but in Gource [...]
Don’t Negate the Premise
Gource is a visualization for software projects: or is it? My previous visualization, Logstalgia, was for website access logs. It turns out the information in a website access log and a VCS history are actually some what similar: they both track users, sort of (an ip address may or may not identify one user, but [...]
Gource: Software Version Control Visualization
Gource (the name is a play on Source and Gorse) is a new visualization for software projects (and perhaps over things? I’ll try to stay focused here) which I released a couple months ago after spending the best part of this year working on it in my spare time and in between projects at work. [...]
