A great way to help think through problems is to take your mind off things with trippy visuals!!

-=-=-

I got a decent Mirror/Flip/Rotate/Kaleidoscope effect working yesterday.
The trick, in the end, was to use context.globalCompositeOperation="lighten";

In typical "Let's just reuse words but with tiny tiny differences" fashion, "lighten" doesn't do what "lighter" does..
Lighter adds, but Lighten doesn't add as much, and mostly only combines.
I honestly don't know why it's called Lighten..
I'm not sure what name would've been better, but ..
..
Numbering would've been better, in my mind. Go with numbering!!!

But it fixed my issue whereby the black background was being redrawn over the top of the rotated/mirrored visuals, thus un-drawing what I'd previously drawn.
"Lighten" composition mode works more like a Luma key, so nothing black is drawn, and the visuals end up overlapping really quite well.

This feature allows for all sorts of neat feedback visuals, so things like the mirror and kaleidoscope effects now work like they oughta.

It means that something that initially looks like this..


Can then become this...


Note that the middle bits are a "bit" lighter after 6 rotations, and aren't resulting in the overblown brightness that I've been struggling with in the past.
And then these sorts of things are a doddle.



Which is nice.

Honestly, it's great when you find one little tiny keyword that solves a whole myriad of issues like that.
It'll be nice to get back to JSE's drawing code, after all this, and see if I can implement any of these features into there, though I will, of course, have to be much more conscious of how much CPU/GPU usage this overlaying is causing.

What I could really do with doing, now, is making a giant "All the presets" panel that gathers everything together into a giant list.. It's kinda silly having the Time Vortex inside the Radial Spectrum effect, and the gorgeous new "UFOlogy" tucked away under the Fireworks effect!!!



Maybe a Random button, too.
That might be nice..
Mmmmm...

I could probably do with adding a Preset Load/Save thing, too..
As always, you can Play with VidGen2 here.



"Cartoon @Derek on an acid trip, psychedelic, trance, techno, house, backbeat, visualisation" by #ArtFlow.ai