post your eye melty abstracts here

I'm really just mashing buttons and playing with sliders! I can see what I can do. In the meantime, I don't mind posting up my cues. Unfortunately, it's only for the Beyond guys. When I get home, I will post up some stuff. Up front though, one of the things I do that help me focus on the shape of the abstract is, I create it as a single color. Later, I edit the actual cue for color properties. This way, I can take the same abstract, copy it and then tweak it slightly so it has the same "feel", but behaves differently. I find that handy for using in the same show to keep the "feel" linear. I need to play more with Beyond and see if I can actually key that. I would like to create the abstract and then over a time period, have my changes tween. Ugh, the thing I love about Beyond is the thing I hate about it, there's a LOT to learn. It was the same when I opened up LSX for the first time. I just stared at the screen for a few minutes trying to figure out what to do. I felt like The 7th Guest, "Which way do I go now?"

I have been following this thread because I love the abstracts you guys have been posting. I see that LSX has been used by most of you to create some wonderful abstracts, but I have LD2000 and Beyond and I don't want to buy more software I don't understand how to use. Figure I should try to master what I have.

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Originally Posted by absolom7691

I'm really just mashing buttons and playing with sliders! I can see what I can do. In the meantime, I don't mind posting up my cues. Unfortunately, it's only for the Beyond guys. ............

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I am looking forward to see what you post to get some inspiration.

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Originally Posted by absolom7691

Ugh, the thing I love about Beyond is the thing I hate about it, there's a LOT to learn. It was the same when I opened up LSX for the first time. I just stared at the screen for a few minutes trying to figure out what to do. I felt like The 7th Guest, "Which way do I go now?"

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I couldn't agree more about Beyond. I have been using it for about a year, love it, and don't even remember the last time I opened Quick Show. But, I know I have only scratched the surface. The Beyond Webinar was great and I hope they have another one soon, but with less topics and with more focus/depth. I have mainly focused on making graphic shows until recently.

When I have tried using the abstract creator/editor in Beyond it makes my brain hurt! I have messed with sliders and settings but my abstracts look sad no matter what I do. If there were even brief descriptions of what each slider, setting, button does and/or a "when you want this...do this" type tutorial that was available to read through, I might be able to make some sense of it. I sound like my friend when we were in college electronics classes and he would ask why a complex problem took multiple steps to solve and why there wasn't a list of "when you want to solve for xyz, use this formula 123" and we would all laugh because we knew that's not how EE works.

It is frustrating when I try to create abstracts and after an hour or so of creating optical garbage, I realize I have wasted my lunch hour and not learned anything new, not even what not to do. I don't know what I'm doing wrong or what I should be doing, but I feel like this is the equivalent of trying to tune your scanners by just twisting every pot on the amp randomly and expecting good output. Maybe I am expecting to learn too much in just an hour every few days.

Anyway, I can't wait to see what you post. I'll be on vacation next week and hope to get some time to figure out the basics of Beyond abstracts. I'm going to bring a projector with me to view my "artwork" if I can get the projector into the car without my wife noticing. She thinks I "play with lasers" too much already without bringing them to the beach.

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She thinks I "play with lasers" too much already without bringing them to the beach.

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That's when you tell her, "How about this, dear, I will only play with my lasers for as many hours as the amount of shoes you own". That should kill the argument, dead! :p

I had been dabbling in the Abstraction tool and like you, I was coming up with junk. After playing with it for 20 and 30 minutes at a time, displaying varying degrees of junk, I quit using it and went back to the trusty LD2K abstract generator. I don't like the way the LD2K abstracts look in Beyond though. From what I have read, it is the way the Beyond system multi-tasks. I don't believe there is a way to fix that. To date, it is the only gripe I have with Beyond, the old "analog" abstracts, both generated in Beyond and also those that are imported from LD2K, don't look too good. Everything else is absolutely fantastic. Anyway, back to the abstraction tool. I finally sat down and said, "I am going to keep playing with this things until I make something that is not trash". I started to find that when I made small adjustments to the sliders, added things here and there, I started coming out with some good looking stuff. For starters, I kept the XYZ sliders locked. My first inclination is always to adjust them independently. I found that I got better results by keeping them locked. Once I got something good, I started adjusting them individually. I found that I had to crawl again before walking because this is not like the "analog" generator.

When I get some time, I will get those cues posted. The circumstances which are keeping me from SELEM are also keeping me busy, elsewhere.

Alright BEYOND guys, here is a sample of the stuff I have been doing with the Abstraction tool. Rather than export a bunch of cues and upload them one-by-one, I just put them all into a workspace. It was much easier. If some of the cues are repeated, it is only because I made slight changes to them, point count and things like that. Some may be identical because they are copies that I was goign to tweak later and never got around it it. Also remember, I design the abstracts in one color and add the color mods later, which is why a lot of them are red (I like to get the shape right first). I only included the abstracts that I built from the Abstraction tool.

**DISCLAIMER** I don't charge, nor do I do commercial work so please do not sell these frames. You can distribute freely or use them in your commercial shows, just don't sell them. I don't mean to sound like a prick but it bugs me when people sell stuff they got for free.

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Originally Posted by buffo

Come to SELEM, Jon! ...

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Hmmm.... HMMmmmm!.... HHMMMMMMMmmmmmm!!!! >:)

tbd..
j

So tonight I threw together a very simple color mod circuit for my console. It's only 1 color at the moment but will soon be expanded on as I work out some bugs. I recorded it to wave if anyone feels like checking it out: https://drive.google.com/folderview?...G8&usp=sharing

It's the .flac file. I'm using 2 square wave generators, one to turn on and off the laser and the other is being used as a chopper. The first part of the file has the chopper enabled and the last half is just the square wave on red. I never changed to speed of the color mod, just made adjustments on X/Y on the console. I don't mind uploading these now and then if there's any interest in them, let me know!

that flac file looked fantastic. zoomy swirly old school effects. i can't wait to see it in full color rgb.

in lsx (i haven't tried it in anything else, yet) the ilda file looks good (not as smooth as the flac, but that's no surprise). there are a lot of hot points moving around the abstract. is that intentional, or an artifact of the wave to ilda conversion?

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Originally Posted by DZ

So tonight I threw together a very simple color mod circuit for my console. It's only 1 color at the moment but will soon be expanded on as I work out some bugs. I recorded it to wave if anyone feels like checking it out: https://drive.google.com/folderview?...G8&usp=sharing

It's the .flac file. I'm using 2 square wave generators, one to turn on and off the laser and the other is being used as a chopper. The first part of the file has the chopper enabled and the last half is just the square wave on red. I never changed to speed of the color mod, just made adjustments on X/Y on the console. I don't mind uploading these now and then if there's any interest in them, let me know!

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Originally Posted by swamidog

that flac file looked fantastic. zoomy swirly old school effects. i can't wait to see it in full color rgb.

in lsx (i haven't tried it in anything else, yet) the ilda file looks good (not as smooth as the flac, but that's no surprise). there are a lot of hot points moving around the abstract. is that intentional, or an artifact of the wave to ilda conversion?

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Thanks swami! I can't wait to see it in full color as well.

The "hot points" are actually intentional. I thought it looked neat that a console could produce what appears to be points in an image. What's happening is one of the VCQO's is coming to a complete stop due to being FM modulated by one of the LFO's.

No DACs were used in the creation of these abstracts!>:)*retardo


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Seksee! I love the abstracts! So, by this: "No dacs were used", I can assume your color mod is working???? [popcorn]

BTW, I love your computer desktop, assuming that is a Floyd cover :p