FUSE Project

[dottore]

The Fuse Lab (Natan Sinigaglia / dottore | Kyle McLean / everyoneishappy | Christian Riekoff / Texone) would like to give you a heads up on a project we are undertaking in these times that we would hope should be of some inspiration and enthusiasm for the beloved VVVV community!

The FUSE project will provide a well researched collection of GPU tools and libraries to use with VL.Stride :

• Domain specific high level node collections
  • Distance Fields & Raymarching
  • Particles
  • Procedural Geometry
  • Textures and Materials
  • GPGPU
• A domain agnostic set of nodes and helpers for patching GPU logic
• A clean collection of abstract shader functions that can be easily referenced for coders

Intended to benefit the community and wider ecosystem :

• Free and opensource
• Well documented
• Produced in collaboration with the VVVV group to iterate and improve on the core shader based workflows and approaches of VL.Stride.

Kindly hosted by the NODE Institute, we presented this project in greater detail and had a great discussion: YouTube video

And the Slides: Presentation PDF

We are seeking support from the community to be able to do this in a sustainable and responsible way.

What that support means for the results is that FUSE will be

• Better made
• More emphasis and attention given to documentation
• Produced on a much more accelerated timeline
• Easy extensibility
• Better maintained

Please do consider helping to support this initiative:

Be a Sponsor: store.vvvv.org/products/fuse

Register for other assistance: Google form

Chat Room: matrix:#VL.Fuse

Source Code: github/TheFuseLab

Funds from these sponsorships are governed by Natan Sinigaglia, Kyle McLean and Christian Riekoff, core developers of the FUSE project.

Thanks and stay tuned for updates!

The FUSE lab

FUSE

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Many thanks to those who have already contributed to make the project happen!

Sponsors:
Refik Anadol, Quayola, wirmachenbunt, schnellebuntebilder, m box

Super Backers:
Analog Native, MESO, Noir, -naut, Takuma

Backers:
amairu, reaktant, Konstantin Semilakovs, Studio Brüll, Studio de Maan, circuitb, Pavel Karafiat, gegenlicht, Chris Plant, Tin Tran, Aleksei Lizunov, Shaul Tzemach, sebescudie, nissidis, urbandrone, Lorenz Potthast, mino, tobik, m4d, lasal, ravazquez, Didi Bruckmayr, Christine Mayerhofer, Metarchetype, motzi, Achim Stromberger, Robe Santoro, Andreu Lucio, chk, Amir Bastan

[sebescudie]

so glad and excited to see this happening, this already looks rock solid… thanks for your efforts guys.

[everyoneishappy]

Just wanted to say a big big thanks to the people who have already helped both with sponsorship and volunteering time. Please be a little patient with us, we will write you all directly shortly.

[veyyev]

THANKS GUYS!!!

[kathi]

Sounds really great!! Yeah!

[hameleon-ed]

Hi! I’m really interesting to experiment with VL.Fuse. Unfortunately, I can’t download the Presentation PDF (file is in owner’s bin). Also after installation of the last version 0.0.17 a lot of nodes a red and when I open some help patch then it generates an infinite number of windows.

[catweasel]

@hameloen-ed Are you using a preview version of gamma? You need a recent preview version to run it, it might be that

[everyoneishappy]

@hameleon-ed sorry if you had some troubles setting up. We are just getting ready to release first preview version on 14/09/21. If you want to try something before then can check https://app.element.io/#/room/#VL.Fuse:matrix.org for latest instructions.

[StiX]

Ok, so I went through all of the help patches for FUSE, and here are my unrequested thoughts, I am mainly focusing on artist / designer point of view, who wants to jump in from Blender.

• amount of nodes needed to make these is impressive, it looks like it will be fun to work with it
• particles could use a few more notes, especially for things that appear for the first time, for example the “Use textures as vector fields” have few nodes that could really use a short explanation why there are - x and OneMinus - nodes, just tell people briefly why. I don’t think this is super time consuming to make, but it will help people a lot. SDF part of the documentation is very clear in this manner I think.
• there could be confusion about which nodes are “core” nodes of the system, and which nodes just hide complex structure to make example patches more readable. Could be good to also put a small note next to it differentiating these.
• getting some periodic stutter in the hero fuse image, is that expected? I am running on beast of pc with 3080 inside
• The worst thing - I think marketing this so far has been a huge failure. All you had to do, guys, is record videos from these example patches - maybe 6 of them, string it together into a 30 sec teaser and post that around on redddit and facebook and wherever with links in the comments. That would have been extremely effective compared to what had happened so far. I do understand that’s extra work, but if you asked the community to make a small teaser, or maybe just send in a few videos from these and put them together, it would save you a lot of time.

I would adopt some concepts from blender, 3 things that came to mind are mixing of shaders by texture/value, using coloramp / gradients a lot, the visual aspect of controlling math as color is really good in blender and controlling UV space with color operations, blending in noise etc. These do not have to be core ideas of a system, byt having an example of how the blender principle translates to a fuse system could ease many people into it. Especially since blender has one of the biggest communities on youtube where people could learn, somehow plugging into that and giving people examples how to translate their understanding of shaders in blender into fuse would help some newcomers a lot.

The docummnetation is very “artsy” - I think its completely normal, but I think it would benefit from few examples focused on loaded meshes and working with typography - which are things that are very common for people that need to do more commercial projects. Very abstract thing to complain about - I would have to do some more work to know what I am missing here.

Overall its really really cool, I would like to try use this in upcoming piece from which I would be able to contribute to development, I will try to do some visualisations with it and hopefully I will be able to wrestle it into what I need. Great Job so far!

Oh and one more thing - where are the noodles? We need noodles.

[dottore]

Hello @StiX,
we value users thoughts since they are insights other perspectives and give us clues on how to generalize personal visions in something “universal”.

First of all, did you have the chance to watch the Fuse presentation that we did last Tuesday 14th at the node institute? I would suggest to do so since many of your thoughts would probably find explanation there (link available in the news section of the fuse website).
…eg. where we explicitly says that, given the limited amount of time and resources we had to focus just on the SDF chapter of the documentation, to have a “prototype” of the help patches that we want before extending the same quality to the entire library.
…or where we says how the particles domain is just at the beginning and it will change a lot in the next weeks. …which explains also why we couldn’t prepare any proper documentation of something which is not done yet.
“artsy” documentation is addressed again by the last sentences.
but suggestions related to help patches are gold and super welcomed! Would be cool if you could provide some example patches. that would help a lot :)

I see your point regarding the blender environment using lot of colors to visualize math and shader things, it’s really important.
This is exactly what’s behind our efforts to offer nice tooltips. we are at the beginning, but we defined a nice workflow and you will see more and more nice tooltips coming out in the future ;)

regarding “marketing”: man, you have no idea how much work is setting up such a thing in such a short amount of time with shortage of human resources.
so yes! we need you! really! we would love if some of the users or backers like you would like to jump in and take responsibility in structuring the library documentation, the communication and the public image. we have so much need of help, really.

I hope that by starting using fuse more you’ll feel less disoriented in the nodeset.
I’m pretty sure the documentation will help this process, that’s why it’s such an important aspect of the project (as mentioned in the presentation).

Thanks again for your inputs!
best

Natan

[StiX]

I did not watched it, I love ya all, but was not that into hearing about it, I do rather dive in, so its ok to just disregard what I have to say about things you are handling already. I am trying to provide feedback more from point of view that is a bit outside of this community, because people are not into watching these presentations if its not already established part of their life.

@dottore

I see your point regarding the blender environment using lot of colors to visualize math and shader things, it’s really important.
This is exactly what’s behind our efforts to offer nice tooltips. we are at the beginning, but we defined a nice workflow and you will see more and more nice tooltips coming out in the future ;)

I did not meant so much colors in interface, but that you can for example blend uv coordinates with “blendtexture” node, to achieve noise. Also how versatile node coloramp could be, that gradient is kinda lfo of shaders etc… Main point is - showing people if you want to do this thing from blender, you can do it like this in stride/fusion real time - just because blender is ubiquitous and lower bar to enter into thinking with shaders. But again this maybe relates mostly to generative materials, etc…

If I will manage to work more with fuse in upcoming weeks, I will try to document outputs, and note some patterns that would be good examples and get back here.

Is there some implementation planned for exporting system, like excelent writerNRT from vvvv?

[dottore]

[dottore]

sorry, couldn’t resist :D

anyway, the point is that you’re giving strong feedbacks not really considering the current state of the project:

• preview release. which means not at all a final product
• community driven project, without important resources and infrastructure to push the development of a product into all its aspects

so in this case, if you want to give constructive feedbacks or even participate to the common journey, you MUST consider the context in which this research happens. This brings back to the fact that you MUST watch the presentation, because in there probably there’s something important about the context.
I’m not saying what you should do my friend :) , just saying that this would probably make your communications more effective.

From tomorrow we’ll hopefully have a nice seat (dedicated category) in the vvvv forum, so finally we’ll be able to collect all the inputs in a coherent way.
You will be super welcomed to post there your opinions, especially since you come from a different background (blender and other tools), bringing fertile new material and ideas to the research.
Looking forward to discuss with you in a structured format about this library that I already love.

have a lovely evening

…btw
BlenderShaderExample.vl (8.4 KB)

[texone]

@StiX picking up from natan thanks a lot for the feedback, we are already collecting thoughts for the real release, agree on the teaser idea, as this was the preview I am sure we have lot of great material for a solid teaser. Also agree on the gradient node, this is something we are working on this will provide a curve that you can use to remap in and output, regarding the mix node we already have all the color operations but will still need to put it in one node where you can select the operation,

I am not using blender but following the community and take inspiration from the node patches that I open in blender to play around with them, so I think your perspective is really helpful. So if you are up for it maybe we can arrange a zoom call where you screenshare so blender patches to highlight stuff there that we should consider.

[StiX]

@dottore wow its great that its so easy to translate, I think that really provides a very easy way how to get more 3d people look into the project! I teach blender to college students, and its cool that I can also show them ways how to do similiar stuff with gamma, realtime, and how their knowledge is transferable between these two platforms.

Dont worry I`ll watch it, I am just really playing an outsiders perspective a bit and teasing you guys, I just want get the most people to join in and make it super easy for them, which is imo hardest part about this whole ecosystem.

@texone I can look through the projects I done with my students and pick things that should be easily transferable, still had some theme behind it and could be enhanced. For example Blender particle system is dumpsterfire imo, they are currently building system based on compute shaders, which is having a lot of traction and could also provide plenty examples that run on both platforms. Stuff like displacement, emmiting stuff by texture from model, etc. would be great to mirror on both platforms, like you can get blender and vl file, and both do kinda the same thing. On the other hand, they are not using SDF at all, so that is part that could be very good differentiator between those two for designer, and the interaction between SDF and particles is very cool imo.