Slipstream
Hyperspace, warp and a black hole, for Resolume
What it does
Two FFGL plugins for Resolume Arena and Avenue in one download. SW Slipstream is a source: space, with stars in it. SW Slip Over is an effect in which your clip is the view out of the front window.
Nothing in the plugin draws a streak. A star sits at some depth and some distance off the line of flight, the camera moves on while the shutter is open, and the star's image runs outward from the vanishing point for as long as the shutter lets it. Speed up and the runs get longer. A streak comes out as bright at its tail as at its head, because the star's image speeds up as it nears and the star brightens by the inverse square, and the two cancel; and a star's light doesn't change when it stretches, it just spreads. Past one pass of the field per shutter the lines stop depending on speed: the steady radial lines of being in transit.
The jump is a journey from normal space into transit and back, by a switch, a button, a loop or a fader. Hyperspace accelerates, flashes and settles into lines (with the later films' mottled tunnel if you want it). Warp draws space in towards the vanishing point, snaps with a flash and a ring, and flies you past stars one by one. Wormhole twists the picture into a whirlpool and swallows the frame in cloud, because one fondly remembered sitcom's model unit made theirs from whipped-up cloud footage. In the Over your clip smears into the streaks, snaps away into the distance and comes back, or twists into the clouds.
Black Hole is Schwarzschild's, done properly. You can't see an event horizon: what you see is its shadow, about two and a half times its size, and the plugin bends everything else round it from tables of the exact orbits, so stars are seen twice and your clip becomes an Einstein ring. The disc is a thin blackbody seen through its Doppler and gravitational shifts, bluer and far brighter on the side coming towards you (Doppler at 0 switches that off, as one well-known film did), and the corona, added up along each bent ray, makes the bright photon ring at the shadow's edge on its own.
- A source (space) and an Over effect (your clip is the view ahead) in one download
- Four looks: Hyperspace, Warp, Wormhole and Black Hole
- Streaks drawn in closed form from a camera's shutter, as bright at the tail as the head, conserving each star's light
- Drive: Hold (a switch), Trip (a button), Loop, or a Journey fader you can scrub
- An exact Schwarzschild black hole: shadow, lensing, Einstein rings, a Doppler-shifted disc and a corona
- Shutter, Top Speed, Tunnel, Stretch, Dispersion, Swirl, Clouds, Hole Size, Disc Tilt, Disc Heat and more
- Universal macOS bundles and Windows x64 DLLs
Where it stands
v0.1.0, and early days. It hasn't been loaded into Resolume on macOS; the fleet's own test host loads both plugins and renders through them there. On Windows it has: both plugins load, register and render in Resolume Arena 7.27.1 on software rendering (no GPU), with every control as declared and the fleet's Arena checks passed three times, the last on the shipped download; each time 18 of the source's controls changed a still picture and 21 or 22 of the Over's, and the ones that act only over time (Engage, the four times and Flash) can't show in a still. An offline harness driving the real plugin code checks the physics out of the picture: a star's streak against a simulated open shutter within 1% along its length, the black hole's shadow within 0.06 px of Synge's formula, an Einstein ring within 0.03 px of an independent ray tracer, and the corona's brightest ring on the shadow's edge with nothing drawing it there. It catches twenty models that are wrong on purpose and twenty-three one-character sabotages of its own shaders and code, and all 67 controls change the picture. The black hole doesn't spin, the plunge and the white hole are cheats, and the Wormhole's clouds flicker at the frame's edges at full speed. The macOS build is Developer ID-signed and notarised. There's a user guide and a browser demo, but no presets and no OpenFX port. Try it in your own rig before you trust it in a show.
Watch it running
Nothing loads from YouTube until you press play.Watch it there instead