Hello everybody,
it's been a long time since i started wondering about getting some advanced visual effects out of pd. I know "advanced visuals" could mean a lot of different things, but let's say I am thinking of pixel stuff like depth of field, bloom, glow, blurring. I kind of tried everything, from basic pix effects to freeframe fx and gridflow convolutions but no matter what I do, since these effects are cpu based the resulting patch is always dead slow.
My first question is: as far as i know pd is born as an audio software, does it make sense to keep pushing it into the domains of visuals?
Don't get me wrong, I love pd and I know the amazing stuff you could get out gem and gridflow. Let's think of all these kind of 3d manipulations, sound visualization, video mixing, opencv stuff, pmpd physics simulation, just to name a few. You could just get some wonderful visuals by only using geos and simple texturing. But, sometimes, I find myself in front of limitations, like the ones about pixel effects I said before, and I wonder if I should just leave pd to what it's good for and move to video driven software like vvvv or "classic" programming environment like Processing.
I know a lot of stuff I've been talking about could be achieved with an irrelevant cpu cost by leaving calculations to the gpu. I think GLSL potential is extremely huge and I got to work some basic blurring, glowing and blooming effects I found on the web, but still seems a little workaroundy for me (especially multipass rendering).
Here is the second question: could opengl and glsl scripting be the solution to my first question? and what do you guys think about having a place where we can host a (hopefully growing) collection of ready to use GLSL effects along with example patches? maybe with a standard framework of objects for multi texture effects and general GLSL handling?
Ok, that's all. Any feedback will be extremely appreciated.
Here follows a simple GLSL blooming effect applied to gem particles (works on macosx 10.5, pd extended, gem 0.92.3)
