#flitterlang — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #flitterlang, aggregated by home.social.
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Luckily, I have the 3D models of the objects and, in Flitter, a bespoke rendering pipeline that already includes all of the machinery necessary to do this. So I can synthesise tens of thousands of labelled images in minutes.
When I created Flitter I wanted it to be a very domain specific language. What is surprising me is that I am discovering that there are more things in this domain than I originally thought. 3/3
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Oh yeah, and a few filters thrown in: a feedback mixer, lens flare and bloom on the bodies layer, and then a filmic tone map on the composited output.
This process of layering shit up is largely how I designed Flitter to work. It is, I guess, the answer to the question "What if TouchDesigner was a functional language?"
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The end result here is bodies spinning in one layer and the head spinning in another, with the first layer texture-mapped onto the head. The two layers are then multiply-composited together. A couple of different directional coloured lights completes the effect.
All of the various parameters that control the animated elements are driven by beat-aligned pseudo-random streams, randomly glitching the rotations, the camera, the direction and colour of the lights, etc.
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Actually, I want to follow this up as I see amazing visuals on here all the time and my first thought is always, "Fuck! That's incredible, how did they do that?". Usually immediately followed by, "God I wish I was that creative."
This is 40 lines of code (plus an external OBJ model and a stripes texture image). The process I followed was largely one of fucking-around-and-finding-out, beginning with the spinning body and then just layering shit on top.
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I regret to inform you that I am back on my shit again, making visuals for a gig…
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Further experiments: more, smaller snowflakes and many more, more colourful spotlights
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Playing with snowflake-ish things for xmas
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Woo! The @alpaca talks are all up for your viewing pleasure:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxqmZjMvoVzw773-Fo9ajkujFfOThuFOP
Looking forward to catching up on the second weekend, which I missed.
I have forced myself to watch my own Flitter talk back and it is not as bad as it felt when I was doing it!
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Your presentation on #FlitterLang yesterday was excellent @jonathanhogg , got me super curious to try it out, it was also really nice to hang out after and find out all about your journey to creating such an interesting creative tool, can't wait to see where you take it and thanks for sharing!
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It’s almost time! I am in Sheffield for the Alpaca conference and festival. I’ll be talking about Flitter this afternoon. You’ll be pleased to hear that I have now finished my slides, but have not yet got my talk down to 15 minutes…
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Oh, hey! In other news: I keep forgetting to say that I'm talking about my visuals language Flitter at the @alpaca conference in three weeks
https://2025.algorithmicpattern.org/conference/
I haven't thought about what I"m going to say yet, so if you're going and have ideas about what you'd like to hear, let me know 😉
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@jonathanhogg Investigating your #FlitterLang posts to see what’s possible with it. Is this something you output to a CRT, or are you simulating a CRT?
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If you want to see some example code, there is a bunch of little scripts here:
https://github.com/jonathanhogg/flitter-examples
At some point I will put sample outputs in there too so you can see what they do without running them, but it won’t be for a few weeks…
If you’re wondering what the paradigm is, it’s roughly JSX but with a functional language: evaluate an expression 60 times a second to generate a node tree that describes what the screen looks like
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Seeking generative/procedural artist beta users! (PLEASE BOOST!)
It’s now 2 years since I open-sourced my pet language, Flitter. I’ve used it for multiple live gigs, interactive installations and video artworks
However, I have no idea if it has value beyond my use. I need people to try it, tell me what they hate and what sucks most in the docs
You need to be comfortable at the CLI, example visuals on the #FlitterLang tag
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Submitted my tax return! So here's a quick Genuary sketch to celebrate. This is today (isometric) plus a catch-up on day 4 (black-on-black) and day 2 (layers).
It's thousands of partially transparent, shiny black cubes drawn (or not) according to a 4D noise function, in an isometric projection and surrounded by 10 rotating point lights in different colours that produce the specular reflections.
Code:
https://github.com/jonathanhogg/flitter-examples/blob/main/genuary2025/day06_isometric.fl
#FlitterLang #CreativeCoding #Genuary #Genuary2 #Genuary4 #Genuary5
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The tricky thing with grass is adding just enough disorder that it looks organic.
Also, the maths of stacking up truncated cones to make a smoothly curved blade is harder than I thought…
#FlitterLang #CreativeCoding #ProceduralArt #InstallationArt
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Back playing with grass today but from a side view, which means I need to curve it for it to look reasonable. Each blade is built up from about 20 truncated cones, squashed slightly flat.
#FlitterLang #CreativeCoding #ProceduralArt #InstallationArt
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Seasons greetings, etc., etc., …
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That said, this wasn't actually the laziest CRT shader I could produce – I'm too much of a perfectionist for that. I made it resolution independent, so it’s actually much more interesting to look at if you scale it up massively
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My neurons are slowly becoming bioluminescent sea creatures! Really pleased at how these are turning out.
This is part of the final sequence of a big new gallery installation that opens in February. I've been working on this project for over a year. It’s the biggest creative coding gig I've ever done and has really changed how I view myself as an artist.
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OK, I think these suckers are looking more like neurons now that they have tails
#FlitterLang #CreativeCoding #ProceduralArt #InstallationArt
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Further experiments today in making organic, frondy floating thingies. These are meant to be neurons, but aren't quite there yet…
#FlitterLang #CreativeCoding #ProceduralArt #InstallationArt
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Today's end-of-day experiment…
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Here you go! Enjoy a lazy retro-CRT-effect version…
(probably only works if you view the video larger than a thumbnail on a high res display)
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Tried something different for Tiny Code Christmas today: an attempt at doing the most literal translation of the “Rasterbars" problem that I can do into Flitter. I was interested in seeing how close I could get to the TIC-80 demo and the starting code.
The core drawing function is surprisingly close to the Lua original, despite Flitter being a completely different paradigm:
https://github.com/jonathanhogg/flitter-examples/blob/main/lovebytetcc2024/day06x_rasterbars.fl
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OK, decided to do the TCC day 2 extra challenge “meta-balls” after all!
As expected, the rendering is a custom shader, but fed from a Flitter 2D particle system modelling gravity and reflections off walls. I experimented with different output equations looking for the most interesting thing I could do in the remaining characters. I enjoy the starkness of the black bands here.
Code comes in at a neat 400 bytes:
https://github.com/jonathanhogg/flitter-examples/blob/main/lovebytetcc2024/day02x_metaballs.fl
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Revisited the fire from yesterday rather than do today's “metaballs" challenge.
I realised that I could use Flitter's vector maths to calculate a single column at a time. I had to add a new collating mean function, but that’s a generally useful thing. I also leant into it being my own language to add some new convenience syntax for nested loops.
The result is both smaller and much faster! I can render a 27,000 element grid at 60fps.
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Had a go at the @lovebyteparty day 1 "extra" TCC challenge for today: "Fire”.
I'm using Flitter's counters as a mechanism for storing the state. Unfortunately, I couldn't get the code much below 450 bytes:
https://github.com/jonathanhogg/flitter-examples/blob/main/lovebytetcc2024/day01x_fire.fl
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*Actual* Flitter work for today: making mycelial networks
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I should be leaving this alone since I have, you know, actual work to be doing, but here's a variation on the tree that better distributes the branches and manages to look a bit more tree-like, while coming in at exactly 400 bytes. New code pushed over the old.