TUTORIALS
BASIC CONCEPTS/VOCABULARY
The easiest way to think about Splash in terms of would probably be a 3D audio reactive ‘painting’ program. The system is built in a way to loosely reflect traditional 2D painting softwares, in that there is a canvas (3D scene), brushes, layers, layer effects and filters. I will explain the setup here a little, but the best way to get a handle on it is to dive in and play.
The basic structure is….
LFO ( Low frequency oscillator)
A timekeeping device that controls the speed of behaviors.
Scene
A scene is a collection of layers, effects, camera controls.
Brushes
Control how you paint layer objects to a layer.
Layer
A layer is a collection of layer objects, and a layer style.
Layer Object
A layer object basically is a 3D point in space with a position, rotation and a scale. How this appears and behaves is defined by the layer style.
Layer Style
A layer style is defined by 3 main components, timing, behavior, look.
Timing
The timing component lets you set each layer to a quantized value of the main master LFO.
Behavior
Behaviors control how the layer objects move and interact in the 3D space.
Look
Looks define how the layer objects on the layer are represented visually.
USING SPLASH
I am hoping the interface is relatively intuitive. Go over the keyboard shortcuts and jump in and give it a go.
First of all I suggest adjusting the BPM up in the top left, and then drawing a straight line across the screen and playing with the controls in the active layer area in the bottom left. This will start to give you a feeling for what everything does. At the moment the labelling is minimal for a reason, I want to remove as much text form the interface as possible and have it graphically represented with icons.
At the moment the artwork is taking a backseat to the functionality and bug squashing so they may be a ways off. The next build will have tooltips built in for all controllers which will work the same as zBrush, mouse over and hold ctrl to get a view of that controllers functionality.
For now play is the only way.
KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS
Mirroring
Mirror X – X
Mirror Y – Y
Mirror angle right – U
Mirror angle left – V
4 a.m. banging psytrance mode – K
Unmirrored – F
Double resolution screenshot – S (will save to root directory)
Preview Cam
Rotate preview camera – Alt + move mouse
Snap preview camera to orthographic views – Alt + move mouse + Shift
Move preview camera – Middle mouse button + move mouse
Reset preview camera – Alt + right click
Randomize Style – R (has a bug where the colour will change to white)
Click – Use brush
Undo last stroke – Z
Radial menus
Adjust slider – Click drag
Slider snapping – Click drag + ctrl
Radial Menus options- Right click drag
Set radial option to all sibling radial menus – Hold shift while selecting option
Adjust audio sensitivity – Up/Down Arrow ( Make sure you check your levels and your mic is on )
OSC/MIDI After you select a radial slider it becomes the active control. Hold L while you send a OSC message to learn.
** OSC messages are sent in the format “/midi/cc int:channel int:cc# int:value” to port 8000 and output to 8001. If you would like to use it with any MIDI controller, pick up a small processing MIDI to OSC app called Moco.
Mapping mode ( very raw implementation, more coming )
Toggle mapping mode – Shift M
Move quad verts – left click drag
Move quad UV’s – right click drag
Testing, feedback and bug reports
Continuing with the experimental nature of this endeavour I will be trying to democratise development as best I can. I will be using a web app called Trello for bug/user report/feedback management.
