Author Archives: Andrew Caudwell

Life is Strange

Here is my tribute to a fascinating new fractal I talked about in an earlier post, the Mandelbulb. (Youtube: https://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. […]

Birth of a Disco Universe

This started out as an experiment with Metaballs and ended up looking like disco colored supernova explosions and interstellar gas. I like how interesting patterns in the clouds emerge out of random behavior. To me, that’s the ideal outcome of a procedural animation. I think I might use this to generate background pictures.

Welcome to The Alpha Blenders

Hello and welcome to my blog about procedurally generated computer graphics. The title, The Alpha Blenders, refers to a key technique in computer graphics known as Alpha Blending. I expect this to be a very visual blog. I will be publishing a lot of images and videos here as I write about my own projects […]