Flyback
Tesla coils and Jacob's ladders, no ozone, for Resolume
What it does
Two FFGL plugins for Resolume Arena and Avenue in one download: SW Flyback, a source with five high-voltage machines, and SW Flyback Over, an effect that makes your clip the ground, so bolts strike its bright parts, arcs jump between its highlights and the flash lights it up.
Air is an insulator right up until the field tears it, and where it tears is a Laplace problem. Every discharge grows by the dielectric breakdown model (Niemeyer, Pietronero and Wiesmann, 1984). The electrodes and the channel grown so far are held at their potentials, the potential in the air is solved on a lattice sized in metres of scene, and the channel extends to a neighbouring site with probability proportional to |∇φ|^η. One exponent decides the look: η = 1 is a Lichtenberg figure, η ≈ 2–3 is lightning, and a large η is a nearly straight arc.
Around that model sit the circuits of the classic machines. The Jacob's ladder's arc follows Ayrton's equation on a supply with a source resistance, so it snaps at an extinction length solved in closed form and restrikes at the bottom. The Tesla coil bangs away at the interrupter rate, and its hot channels remember where they've been, so streamers get longer once the interrupter outruns their cooling. The Van de Graaff sparks when Peek's field is reached at the sphere, every C·V/I seconds, and a rough sphere just sits there in corona instead. The plasma globe's filaments wander about and gather to a finger on the glass.
All five share one model of light. Current flows through each grown tree by Kirchhoff, and a frame's light is exactly the event's energy times a luminous efficiency, so a bang split ten ways isn't ten times brighter. Colour comes from each gas's spectral lines through the CIE observer, going white-hot as a channel's current gets near an ampere.
- A source and an Over effect in one download; Over makes the clip's bright parts the ground
- Five machines: Jacob's ladder, Tesla coil, Van de Graaff, plasma globe and Lichtenberg figure
- Every discharge grown by the dielectric breakdown model on a real Laplace solve
- Each machine's circuit decides when the air breaks and how much energy it carries
- Light conserved per event and split by Kirchhoff; colour from each gas's spectral lines
- Fire button, audio onsets that fire it (a singing Tesla coil) and audio-driven voltage
- Air, neon, argon and neon-xenon, shutter angle and camera persistence
- Universal macOS bundles and Windows x64 DLLs
Where it stands
v0.1.0, and early days. It's never been loaded into Resolume on macOS. On Windows it has: a build loads, registers and renders in Resolume Arena 7.27.1 on software rendering (no GPU), both plugins with every parameter as declared, and 33 of the source's and 43 of the effect's controls were seen moving the picture; eight of the source's machine controls work through discharges too brief for the check's single frames. An offline harness driving the real plugin code checks the central claims: the potential solver holds the coaxial closed form, η = 1 clusters measure a fractal dimension of 1.744 against 1.742 for true DLA on the same estimator, every Jacob's ladder arc goes out at Ayrton's extinction length, the Van de Graaff and the Tesla coil fire at their predicted rates, current balances at every node, and each frame's light matches the event's energy within a derived bound. It catches thirteen models that are wrong on purpose and seven one-character sabotages of its engine and shaders, and every control changes the picture where it applies. It costs about 1–1.3 ms a frame at 1080p on macOS. Some constants are models rather than measurements (the low-current Ayrton constants, the streamer field, the globe's glass coupling), the Lichtenberg figure growing over seconds and staying lit is staging, and no real audio has reached it in a host, so how it reads Resolume's 64-bin FFT is still an assumption. There's a user guide and a browser demo (a port of the engine, only checked by reading it), but no OpenFX port. Try it in your own rig before you trust it in a show.
Watch it running
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