SourceBinder

Pixelbender + SourceBinder = PixelbInder

mind — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 15:16:48 +0000

We prepared a little surprize fot the FITC Toronto: A new, node based visual editor for editing Pixelbender kernels.This application will be a standalone web based application, but it works also hand in hand with SourceBinder. The application will be first showcased on the FITC, so be sure to come!

PixelBinder supports all input variable types so you can easily create 2 channel inputs for audio mixing for example. The bytecode generation is based on the HaXe pbj assembler library and was further developed for compiling purposes. The kernel files can not only be used in SourcerBinder, but can be downloaded like regular pixelbendel kernels.

PixelBinder visual editor

Try it out!

sampi — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 15:37:02 +0000

By now, you may have noticed, that the blog was moved here, and the new dashboard took its place!
We also started giving out invites, but until everyone got his/her activation code…

the new dashboard

…we have enabled anonymous access to SourceBinder ( just click on a composition to preview it, and then click Open ), so from now on, you can try the tool (although you can’t save your compositions without a valid user account), and share your experiences!

Populate the forum, read the wiki!

JiglibFlash physics in SourceBinder

mind — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 15:01:39 +0000

As we move on with our favorite toy, we added the JiglibFlash library, which although seems to be on the beginning of it’s way in the world of open source Flash libraries, but it seems to be a very promising one. We have created five basic nodes: Jiglib Physics engine, JigShere, JigBox. JigPlane and yes Jigcar too. I have created a fairly simple composition showing a wall of boxes which will be destroyed by a bigger box falling down. The video shows the whole process starting from a simple one box setup. You can see in the video how easy it is to duplicate a bunch of nodes: when you select more nodes connected together and you also add the incomng and outgoing connector to the selection, the duplicated branch will not just be connected together like the original, but it also will be connected to the same incoming and outgoing nodes, assuming the outgoing connector is a multiple type one. So, take a look and try it yourself:

here is the composition for you to try.

Physics made with SourceBinder using JiglibFlash and Papervision from Balazs Serenyi on Vimeo.

SourceBinder Cloud

sampi — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 21:19:24 +0000

SourceBinder Cloud

Next Stop: Toronto

mind — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 10:22:16 +0000

FITC Toronto 2009

If you missed getting a ticket to the FITC Amsterdam don’t be sad, although it will probably be the biggest freakin tech event around, but there is soon another one to come: the FITC Toronto will be in aprill this year, from 25 to 28. And this time you better hurry with the tickets: Early Bird pricing ends this wendsday at midnight. And before i forgot to mention SourceBinder will be there to, as i have been invited to show our thing to the other hemisphere too.

New SourceBinder FP10 on the way!

mind — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 11:43:59 +0000

With today, all content for SourceBinder and FlashFilterLab is has been moved to a brand new server. The old server was way too overloaded. This step is the first on the way to the SourceBinder public release. With the server transfer there might be things screwed up. If you encounter any weirdness please let us know.

The next step will be the private test of the new refactored redesigned flash-player-10-SourceBinder. This step will be due on the beginning of February. We plan to invite some lucky people already on the waiting list for this event. Put a comment here if you would like to be there !

Till the new Binder is out, the current version of SourceBinder will be frozen. That means users (already invited) will not be able to make/save compositions and nodes. Old compositions will be still available for viewing.

Along with the new SourceBinder release we are redesigning sourcebinder.org which will act as a community site and as the dashboard for the upcoming SourceBinder era. The design is not final, but i will put it here, so you can have a look and make comments, suggestions on it.

Sourcebinder's new cloth

Refactoring and a little flint experiment

mind — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 18:03:51 +0000

Although it could look as there would be not to much happening with SourceBinder these days, but i can ensure you: we are heavily working to get SourceBinder into public beta for February. In case you have missed it: SourceBinder will be introduced in Amsterdam on the FITC. And i can tell you we have a long long way to go. Currently the whole source code is going through a refactoring which was already quite necessary since it evolved from a prototype which we made for the Flashconference last year. But refactoring is a good opportunity to re-think the whole environment with interaction design and simplicity kept in mind. Hopefully i can make a post soon on the new killer feature which is to simplify the quite difficult task of putting together compositions.

To keep you patient while waiting to lay hands on our shiny thing i made a composition public which i made using the cool Flint particle library and of course Papervision. Flint is really just ideal to be put into sourcebinder: there are so many classes to try out which a huge variety of settings. In this composition i made a little twist on a typical particle setup: the initial particle positions are derived from a DisplayObject3D-s vertex positions.

Spacetime composition

Click on the image to open the composition in preview mode.

This way any 3D object with accessible vertex information can be used. In this comp i used a torus to drive my little particles. To make a nice animation i used LFO nodes to create a constantly changing forcefield. Be sure to try different power and epsilon settings which affect the gravity field. If you happen to loose your particles you can replay the animation anytime with the restart button.

If you would like to explore the composition click here to open it in Sourcebinder. Don’t forget: you can also have a look at the sourcecode of the nodes by double clicking two times on them.

using a displayObject3D's vertex information..

Spheres dancing in the fog

mind — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 20:53:31 +0000

Working with a software that is in development state is a quite unpleasant thing to do. The lack of documentation, features changing from day to day, bugs on every corner and such things are the common attributes of development releases. As SourceBinder of course makes no exception from that, it makes it even more astonishing to see what some users get out of it. As a matter of fact there are only few better things to do, than to watch compositions that were made with our tool. And ever since we have invited the first few alpha users, there has been one guy who always manages to draw our attention with his compositions and that not only because of his commitment and enthusiasm. So this post goes to Stevie, and his dancing spheres composition. Keep it going mate!

Oh, before i forget! The tiny black window is our new feature to enable composition creators to choose any attribute that “makes” a composition. Those published attributes automaticaly appear in this control to enable the viewer to try out the unlimited variations one can get.

Sound visualization

Design. Technology. Cool Shit – FITC

mind — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 10:29:54 +0000

Things are getting exciting these days: we have been invited to present SourceBinder at the FITC Amsterdam 2009. The conference will be held in February 2009, so be sure to check in if you are around somewhere. We have a lot of ideas how to make the presentation a live tutorial performance, but i can’t tell you more right now. The timing by the way seems just to be perfect, February should be the month to release a public version of Binder. There are quite a lot of things to do but it should be possible.

Anyway, have a look at the speakers list from the conference, what a cool selection. More info about the conference: www.fitc.ca

FICT Amsterdam

The famous rubber arrow

mind — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 09:49:39 +0000

Our long awaited Flash Forward Award, the big rubber arrow just arrived with FedEx. It is surprisingly heavy, but makes a really good sculpture for my desk. The only problem is that everyone would like to touch it. Have a look instead..

Flash Forward Festival Award

GeoRSS in 3D action – Highly innovative software engineering

mind — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 11:51:54 +0000

We had the honour to present SourceBinder at an EU conference about the future of ICT in Budapest. The title of our presentation was “Highly innovative software engineering“. As we did not had time so far to create complex applications with SourceBinder to proove how good our framework is to prototype applications, we had to create one very fast. We started one day before the conference so it was a nice challenge. Our goal was to create an application that visualize images put on a yahoo maps based geo tagging service, indageo.hu (sorry its in Hungarian) Our company made this system for a well known hungarian news portal index.hu, and with it’s service anyone can send MMS messages from hungary to a given phone number and based on the location that we get from the GSM cell information, the system puts the images right on the map. Images can be uploaded and put on the map as well. More info in english about this sytem can be found here: guanxi.hu

Alright but back to the topic, the whole thing got ready 3 minutes before my presentation was due. I can tell, that was perfect timing. But i can not complain, with the fact that such an application was ready in less than 1.5 days is a quite good proof on rapid protoyping.

The protoype: drag, zoom to navigate, click on thumbs to fly

FlashFilterLab won at FlashForward Film Festival!

mind — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 18:33:23 +0000

Our former most favourite toy, FlashFilterLab won the famous rubber arrow in the category application on the FlashForward festival in San Franciso. We were quite surprized when we read the news. Unfortunately no one could make it from us this year to Frisco, but i hope we will be there next year with binder too, cause like one of our mates said: if people like FlashFilterLab, they will go crazy about Binder. I really hope so. So as a tribute let me just put the trailer video of FFL here. Have fun!

Our favourite composition so far

mind — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 20:11:27 +0000

This composition is so fun to play with, we will definitely make a directed movie out of it as soon as we get some dancer move for us again. This cut was done in 2005 for a little experimental movie we have done with flashfilterlab. I will publish a link to the video as soon as i find it.

usage: mouse moves the camera, scroll wheel moves the dancer front/back

Click to open composition

Tie a knot on this one!

mind — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 17:28:49 +0000

Dear visitor, take this long chain made out of particles and try to tie a knot on it. The first who succeeds gets a free sourcebinder invitation immediately. Screen shots can be sent by email to our address.

The vertical mouse movement drives the amplitude of a low frequency oscillator (LFO) applied to the chain. The values coming from the LFO are used as an input for a queue wich defines the particle arrays particle position.

Particle chain

Lost registrations

sampi — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 10:01:41 +0000

We are sorry to inform all of you who applied for alpha invitation ( from 04.08 to 12.08 ), that due to human error your email addresses were lost. Please use link below, to check if you are still registered. You can apply for the alpha again where you did last time ( and we promise to keep your email addresses this time )

Am I Still Registered?
Find out, by clicking this link

Particles and sound spectrum

sampi — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 10:43:56 +0000

Here are two creative compositions, that were made in collaboration by our very first sourcbinder alpha users. The first one uses PV3D particles and the bitmap effect layer to create a “3d-blurred” dizzy particle field. The second uses sound3d to play and transform mp3 sound in space and a sound spectrum node with a cube array to visualize the sound.

Dizzy Particles

Sound Spectrum Visualisation

There’s someone under the carpet – displacing vertices with image stream

sampi — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 10:41:59 +0000

Making a carpet out of a simple plane is not as difficult as it seems. Just drive the plane through a modifier node and use an image stream as the modifier source. A video or the webcam footage will be perfect. The modifier node displaces the vertices by an offset calculated from the corresponding the pixel values of the mapped source image. The best result can be achieved with a white background and a dark object. Alternately you could also use an interactive sprite and convert it to a bitmap. If you have a webcam and you are in a bright room you have to check out the second composition.

Displacement with Video

Displacement with Webcam

GreatWhite FX

sampi — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 10:36:29 +0000

I was so excited about And Zupko’s work with the new Papervision effect branch, i just had to give it a try in SourceBinder. You can try the compositions and play with the setting as usual (from now on) in explore mode. If you have a webcam you should connect the MovieMaterial node to the Sphere in the first composition. You can do that either by Alt clicking the MovieMaterial node and droping the line on the Sphere node or with the output connector of the same node. SourceBinder will aply the connection automaticaly on the material input of the sphere, because of its type. Have fun!

3DFx Layer on Webcam

3DFx Layer on Cube

First things to try – SourceBinder Xplore mode

sampi — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 10:33:51 +0000

While we are are still preparing for a public alpha we just decided to let our nice visitors also play with some composition. So we made an explore mode for SourceBinder which in fact is the environment but with only two features enabled: binding and adjusting. Be sure to doulbe click on one of the nodes in the compositions and try to play with the atribute values and of course watch the result in realtime.

Particles in a Sphere

Simple Earth

Motion visualization, 3d and Wiimote

sampi — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 10:31:17 +0000

Take a video from a dancer, cut off the background with a threshold node, put every frame on a plane into a 3d space and there you go! The same works with the webcam as well, asumed you have a solid background. Driving the whole thing with the wiimote you get some pretty cool stuff. Click on the image for a video showing the composition with a wiimote.

Motion Visualisation in 3D

You can also watch this video on Youtube
Though the quality is much more worse

Physics simulation and Wiimote

sampi — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 13:30:25 +0000

Here is a video that shows the process of making a basic physics simulation in SourceBinder. In the simulation, 60 spheres are bouncing on a plane. The plane’s rotation is driven by the pitch and roll values of a wiimote. The physic simulation is done with the great WOW phisics engine, for the 3d rendering we used Papervision3D primitves and the Wiimote handling is done with WiiFlash. Click on the image to watch the video.

Physics Simulation in 98 seconds

You can also watch this video on Youtube
Though the quality is much more worse

Video of SourceBinder in action

sampi — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 10:28:28 +0000

This video tutorial shows how Binder can be used to create a Flash movie with 3d objects (using Papervision) and regular Flash stuff, like perlin noise and glow filter mixed together.

View Tutorial Video

Screenshots of SourceBinder

sampi — Fri, 30 May 2008 10:24:53 +0000

The big screenshot pictures the featured demo composition of a globe put in some wierd space. The screenshots underneath were made of a basic physics composition which uses the WOW physics engine and the Papervision library to display the objects.

SourceBinder in Action

Nodes

Camera3d 1

Camera3d 2

Camera3d 3

SourceBinder at the Flashconference and fmx/08

admin — Fri, 30 May 2008 06:23:10 +0000

SourceBinder’s first public presentation was held in Stuttgart at the Flashconference by Balázs Serényi head of Visual MINDS and founder of SourceBinder. The whole conference was a stunning, well organized event. Big thanks goes to Wolfgang Schmidt-Sichermann for making it possible for us to be there. And another big-big thank goes to the great guys who were absolutely inspiring, enthusiastic and supporting. So, here’s the unofficial Thank you list: Mario Klingemann aka Quasimondo, Marcel Fahle from Slot3, Carlo Blatz from Powerflasher, Jonathan Coe, Sebastian Locker and Patrick Thiel.

More info and the video about the presentation can be found under the following links: