EyeCandy.

November 14, 2005 5:28 AM

EyeCandyFilter: I'm looking for some stunning CGI visuals to show off a new A/V system. Psychedelic computer graphics a-la X-mix are what I have in mind - a shrine to the pulsating, shiny, magic thing. Any suggestions?

I still love my X-Mix videos but surely this is 2005, there must be something exponentially more amazing? Another old favourite is Milkdrop for Winamp. I'm a child who loves flashing colours and bright lights ... please feed me. Download is best (for Windows) but DVD is cool too. (WXGA from a capable PC and DVD to drive the display - 5.1 Sound). It just needs to be beautiful. Oh, and if you know the true name of the 'pulsating, shiny, magic thing', please let me know.

posted by grahamwell to Media & Arts (12 answers total)

http://draves.org/blog/archives/000275.html
posted by alexst at 5:30 AM on November 14, 2005

Best answer: http://electricsheep.org/dreams/ (No audio with those though)

And by pulsating shiny magic thing, when set to music it is often called a Visualiser. If that's what you mean?
posted by alexst at 5:33 AM on November 14, 2005

Cthugha has been around forever, and I think it was probably the original "pulsating, shiny, magic thing" that responds to music.
posted by chuma at 6:03 AM on November 14, 2005

What about some demos?
posted by PenDevil at 6:25 AM on November 14, 2005

One of the first things that I do when I get my shiny new 37" LCD TV, is connect up my Amiga (or possibly my Mac mini and make do with emulation...) and crank out some of the old demos - Jesus on E's, Spaceballs, 9 Fingers, etc.
Perhaps not quite what PenDevil suggested, but similar!

Unfortuantely the quality of these demos is traditionally not up to high-resolution standards - they're more about cranking out good effects with low RAM/CPU usage.

Try and snag some HD demo files for movies or games...

There was also another thread recently about pulsating, shiny, magic screensaver things - you may find some of those useful...
posted by Chunder at 6:57 AM on November 14, 2005

I'll second electric sheep. It is truly amazing. If youre looking for winamp visualizations, you can't get any better then G-Force.
posted by Mach5 at 8:30 AM on November 14, 2005

Even though it's about five years old, the SereneScreen Aquarium looks amazing as a screen saver on my A/V system.
posted by justkevin at 10:19 AM on November 14, 2005

I find the eSheep are perfect no matter what the music.
posted by five fresh fish at 11:18 AM on November 14, 2005

JESS
posted by phrontist at 11:54 AM on November 14, 2005

Media Center has a somewhat advanced IDE for programmatically creating and tweaking visuals. You can embed visuals, Flash, and HTML objects into custom "Now Playing" screens and tweak away, pulling in tag data or whatever. It also runs G-Force.

But Cthugha was and is brilliant. When I saw it on a friend's PC back in the early 1990s it was one of the main reasons I bought a PC and a shiny new 16-bit (!) sound card.
posted by meehawl at 5:51 PM on November 14, 2005

Response by poster: Thanks, electric sheep does indeed rock. If that's what my puny Pentium can do, I'd really like to see what a modern supercomputer could come up with.
posted by grahamwell at 9:10 AM on November 15, 2005

That's what a network of puny Pentiums (and a lot of G4s and G5s) can do. Each frame is rendered by an individual computer on the eSheep network, then packaged as a movie and sent to your machine. What you're seeing is playback, not rendering.
posted by five fresh fish at 11:31 AM on November 15, 2005