I didn’t have one. Not really. Like most of my demos I start out with some notion of what I want, or if something inspires me it’ll spark some idea. In this case I was watching through Robert Hodgin’s EYEO talk and the demos he did. I ended up wanting to recreate the Cornell box that he had, though in WebGL rather than OpenGL, but beyond that I didn’t have much else. But then microphone access landed in Chrome Canary…
On June 5th, 2012, I spoke at Eyeo Festival 2012 in Minneapolis. For the talk, I created 12 new projects. The theme present in all of the projects was the Cornell Box. I wanted to try something different from my usual way of doing things. Usually I focus on the content and neglect the environment so all of my work usually floats in an infinite black or white void. This time, I would create an environment in which to stage my experiments and go from there. This environment, or setting, should be simple. Something I know I could do well as opposed to something more complex like a full terrain engine which I might be able to pull off but it would be sloppy at best.
This project revisits the code originally created for the Written Images project. There were some aspects of the code which always frustrated me that I didn’t know how to address at the time. In reworking this code, I finally figured out how to deal with large numbers of point lights in GLSL shaders as well as getting a better handle on dealing with the magnetic field itself. Previous versions used a rotation matrix to try and whip and spin the magnetic field into interesting forms. This was not an ideal solution. So I gutted the magnetism code and restructured it so that I wouldn’t need to rely on tricks. The results are quite promising.
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