Re: VRML lattices

Hi Gene,

I'll give it a go and we can see what happens.

To start with, I'll just show the lattice and aim
to be able to click on the points of the lattice,
lines, and if possible, faces for notes and chords.

When it comes to virtual musical instrument construction,
one may need to go beyond VRML 2.0 for some of the
things one wants to do.

The script nodes can detect the position of the mouse in the 3D scene, but
they can't detect which p.c. keyboard keys are pressed. Also there's no Midi In.
So you are limited to single notes played from the mouse, or pre-defined chords.

It's all based on the idea of the visitor interacting with the 3D scene
using a mouse, or possibly a data glove, with the keyboard used as an
auxilliary aid for navigating the scene.

Also you can't play individual midi events, just complete midi clips.

Cortona license the SDK for their plug in so possibly one
could use it to make something more flexible for microtonal
music, based on a VRML model but with maybe an extension of
the scripting capabilities to let one play midi events, or
something of that ilk. Depends how easily cusomisable thier
SDK is - I'm very impressed by the quality of the programming
of their VRML PAD which I use all the time now that Im working
on VRML again.

Alternatively, if Virtual Flower displays the lattices itself,
it could work in consort with FTS to play the notes
(probably better than to add a midi GUI to VF)

Anyway, can be done, and probably just a matter of time before
someone does it. Meanwhile I can make a start on it by
doing whichever things can be done easily and well in VRML
2.0, as it is, first.

Idea that I'm mulling over at present is to just join the lattice
points with cylinders coloured according to the direction so you
have one colour for each lattice vector as for David's method,
and then those could play diads. For triads, filling in the faces
would mean you can only see the nearest ones to click on, but
with a script node you could maybe do it so that if you
click on a diad and then an adjacent single note while it
is still playing it plays the triad - or something.

I've released virtual flower at
http://virtualflower.co.uk

but nothing particularly microtonal about it yet, except for the screen
saver which can play any audio clips one likes to accompany the scenes
and comes with FTS fractal tunes by way of examples.

Does have some nice mathematical object construction things
- go to Flowers Etc. | 3D Flowers and select the mathematical
shapes from the drop list and you can select from teh platonic
solids and truncate them, connect the edge mid points or face
centres, and make them into geodesic spheres. Then use
the option to make a single object tree. Then you can show them
all as anaglyphs.

Also can already make the lattices from Output | select Lattice
from the drop list - but with no music yet.

Another thing I plan to add is an option to make my dekany and
hexany etc. models from teh templates - just get VF to do the
search and replace - you enter a list of factors to use.
That is certainly possible and very easy to implement.
Just select them from a drop list and click a button to
make the model. I'll do it so VF starts up FTS if it
isn't running, and you can use FTS to choose the midi
instrument to play and pitch, or maybe that much
of it could be done in VF too in which case one wouldn't
even need to show FTS to make the clips, just run it
in the background. Needs a little more programming in
FTS first.

Anyway I'll let you all here know when there is something
of microtonal interest developed. Does have the
screen saver already.

As a very new first release it may well still have
significant bugs at this point.

Robert