music video made by photoevaporation
We designed new icons to go with our new UI style. We made sure to keep them in the same style of the open source feathericons designs, since they are already super awesome, minimalistic and were already being used for some UI elements in cables.
It wasn't an easy task, so we've made sure to try allot of different directions. As you can see, some icons design worked others didn't.
Maybe the feathericons collection is in need of some awesome illuminati and skulls icons?
For those of you who always wanted to be more "inside" of your patch, we now offer the ability to have the renderer as a patch background.
Most of the menus in the editor got smaller, received animations here and there and also have been repositioned. You still find the main menu on the top, it moves to the right when opening the code-editor now. The configurable sidebar made way for a smaller version with all the important shortcuts. A new one is the icon bar on the lower right that lets you zoom in and out and turn on full screen, handy if you do not have a mouse wheel for example. All of these will undergo some more changes in the future, but we are quite happy with the new foundation...hope you are, too.
We added a Delay op that gives you the possibility to add delay, warble and grittiness to existing audio streams. The documentation has also been updated!
A lot of bug fixes, tiny updates and more user-friendly UX with already existing audio ops, check out the changelog for more.
Spending (most of) your time untangling a lot of cables? Triggers especially have the habit of accumulating on outports. We gave the Sequence op a "clean up" function to make your live just that one missing bit easier:
Ever wanted to create an op but not clutter your UserOps namespace? Only need this specific functionality in this patch? Need a small snippet of JavaScript that executes in place? Think this one problem you have can be better solved in code instead of patching?
To give you more control on how your work is presented on, say "made with cables", or any social media site, we now allow you to create a screenshot on demand. Manually picking the face of your patch, so to say.
Last year saw five big updates that we made to cables. In February, we gave you GLTF-Support, working with MSDF-Fonts and basic "Multiplayer"-Functionality, April came with a lot of cleanup and fixes, July gave you the possibility to play with physics a bit, made sharing your patches easier working with collaborators and gave you data nerds a bit more functionality on arrays.
But what did you people do with all of that? Let's see:
These are the top patches of the year, ordered by likes in descending order, attributed to the patch-owner:
People use cables for work and privately, for money and for free, for arts and commercial projects.
We taught you how to VJ - using cables.
So as you can surely see: It has been quite a year for cables and the community. Stay tuned for things to come!
As of today we will be releasing new video tutorials aimed at using the HTML and CSS ops inside of cables.
The goal is to keep them as short and informative as possible like our byte sized video series.
Could you tell us a little about yourself ? (background, previous work/s, current work/s) Hi, I'm Chris Engler from Hamburg, running a studio called wirmachenbunt, hence the username. We create primarily interactive media installations, ranging from large scale video wall presentations to complex exhibits, combining real time graphics, physical input and architecture. So far vvvv has been the tool of choice, especially when it comes to boygrouping (multi-device rendering) and connecting to all sorts of electronics. Apart from the studio works, I teach at the Muthesius University of Fine Arts and Design. Creating digital projects / artworks for over 10 years now, it is natural to explore new ways of publishing and emergent playgrounds. I actually registered at the cables website in 2017 but didn't dive into the tool too much. But it was kinda amazing what you could do in the browser at this point. There was some conversation with pandur in between the years and then right before corona hit germany, we managed to organize a workshop at the university. This was the kickoff for me to actually understand cables and have a go with it. How did this project start out? What were the end goals Well, thanks to corona, my friend Patrick at LOGICDATA came along with the idea to bring the canceled trade show content to the web. A few pingpong discussions later, the draft was a vertical scroller, controlling a camera animation, seamlessly through a virtual office space, highlighting the products of LOGICDATA. This includes some secondary interaction, like moving the table up and down. We had like 6 weeks from draft to release, using cables for the first time. The end result is pretty much what we wanted. There will be an update in the future, since we learned a lot, content-wise and how the interaction is perceived. One thing we didn't finish in time is multiple virtual humans, animating through the scene. Why did you decide to use cables to create this webpage? Short answer, we needed WebGL and a node-based environment felt familiar. Can you tell us what other programs and processes that you used to prepare the content? There are the obvious ones like Photoshop and Illustrator. Blender proved to be the best match for cables concerning 3D stuff. The GLTF export just works. We used to use Cinema4D alot before but we’re transitioning to blender now. Primarily due to the export trouble with Cinema4D. There was actually a bit of vvvv involved, I made a patch to bake the alpha channel of a PNG sequence to JPEGs.
Is the HTML and CSS a part of the cables patch or is it a separate layer?
The HTML and CSS is generated directly by cables. Joscha (responsible for the HTML stuff) had to make a lot of new op's to manage the HTML layer with arrays. It's awesome you can create HTML elements with cables, but next time we will go a different way. Primarily to work in a collaborative way on a project. One can handle the HTML layer outside of cables, while the cables developer can progress independently. We might reconsider this workflow if teams can work in parallel within a cables project.
How did you make one large seamless scrolling experience?
Everything depends on one value, controlling a GLTF camera animation and translating the HTML content. Big thanks goes to pandur for the emergency help during the project, especially the camera data ops and missing quaternion2euler fun.
I cared a lot about file size and performance, since the goal was 60fps on a broad range of devices. Hence bits and pieces are only active (ifthen FTW) when in range. Multiple 3D objects are instanced to save draw calls, which works quite well with the GLTF data you get. And the engine image sequence uses JPEGS and a shader to achieve small size but with transparency.
What were the hardest challenges you encountered during the development process?
Not so much cables itself, I'd say multiplatform and browsers. For an offline developer like me, it was kinda scary to go down this rabbit hole. There have been a couple of moments, where things just didn't work on some devices and we had to find out, painfully where things could go wrong. Like iOS loves power of two textures and everything else doesn't care. Or the performance was rubbish on a high end android device which was caused by some constantly evaluating op.
Anything else you'd like to share?
First, I fell in love with cables. It is playful to just open the browser and get going. I can show the stuff everywhere and everyone can have a go with it. And cables has the best of both worlds, patching and the ability to easily extend its functionality by code. And i'm not a javascript pro 🙂 .
