Well then, Here you go. The Choreographics manual.
Enjoy!
Ron
I looked through the manual, but didn't notice anything that suggested a powerful 3d cycloid generator. Choreographics looks to me like it is about vector art entry, sequencing, and synchronization. The only mention of cycloids I saw was in the attached figure illustrating some other functions. The attached image is from sail away, video viewable on line courtesy of Ron, I believe. Any guesses what was used for the 3d cycloids such as this around the time of Moonrock?
Greg,
Those grids were probably produced using the SAGE system (a 68000 based computer if I'm not mistaken...) Jon R. was the last to have those hardware remnants, unless they also went to Lumalaser.
Choreographics did have the ability (if I remember correctly) to warp things like that flat grid around a sphere, cylinder, and cones, and to take flat artwork and rotate them around X, Y, and Z axes (with perspective and distance dimming), so while it MAY not have had the ability to have 3D shapes as basic figures it COULD rotate flat art and SIMULATE 3D art. My memory is fuzzy (it's been 25 years since I sat at the console!) and I don't have time to read the manual right now (working on a couple presentations for the Exploratorium and my Youtube channel...).
Ron
Today I had an opportunity following a setup for a show, to record a few bits of ILDA frame based content that was the last laser related work I did prior to my meeting Brian and Ron here on PL.
lasermaster1977 discussed in another thread recently the formula for an animated analog talking mouth. In the second segment of the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiXl6y9mp6Q
I tried my hand at the analog mouth effect in the robot conversation from The Planets by Tomita. All the imagery in the video except the Vision On logo is cycloids. Attached is my cycloid map for the telephone and the sailboat.
The encouragement is appreciated. May I offer a few pages of my ground zero to navigating the domain of cycloids? I notice that the ratios involved in the cycloids in one of the two forms presented are much easer for a human to distinguish that when presented in the other form.
Also, here is a wobbling bubble and water droplet, and a snap of some interleaved dogloids and spirals.
A great summary of harmonic ratios. I did the same thing back in the day but memorized them for the most part. The thing that struck me the most were how the cycloid ratios for base circle frequency vs. AM frequency were similar to music semitone ratios, plus how the sum of the ratios equaled the number of inner loops or outer petals. In the harmonographic books of the day and in the London museum of science I posted in one of my early PLF posts that had harmonograph machine examples yielded the same things.
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Everything depends on everything else
Two new features have been added. First, a wav file containing imagery can now be substituted on demand for the XY input signals. This bridges the emulated 6b system with other cycloid generating software such as cyc.
Second feature: The process of iterative editing requires beginning the playback of audio files at some offset, rather that at the first frame. The experts at bela provided a needed fix for this on a dev branch, and after a long winded process of backing up, reinstalling, updating and rebuilding four belas, the laser player is now a convenient tool for creating and editing segments out of longer archived shows.
The archived shows each require being played through eight times in order to drop in all the default image sources. This is a time consuming part of archival work, something to which I expect Ron can relate.
Once again, much gratitude to Brian for turning over the materials to me to be restored and archived.
It's been fun to watch your progress!
"There are painters who transform the sun into a yellow spot, but there are others who, with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun." Pablo Picasso