Kolja Kähler

Games = Art + Tech + ❤

Software

  • Arduino Prototyping: It’s a clock!

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    Over the past few months, I digged more deeply into the Arduino platform. One ongoing project is a clock with moon phase display (since I already implemented the computations for my astronomy app, Cor Leonis). I started out with an LED matrix and 7-segment displays like this: Tons of wire! Over time, I decided to use 2 8×8 LED matrices, switched to a smaller Arduino compatible board (Adafruit Pro Trinket),…

  • Cor Leonis 5.0 released

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    After a looooong break, I picked up development on my astronomy app, Cor Leonis, again. The latest version 5.0 is available now for iOS devices in the Apple App Store. The one big feature which justifies the major version jump: the moon! While I was working on the moon info panel, I also beefed up information about the planets in our solar system a lot. Hope you like it!

  • New demo: moon shader

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    When I was thinking about how to put the moon into the 3D view of my astronomy app, I figured it would be a waste to actually display a textured sphere. After all, we always see the same side of the moon. All that is needed is a textured quad, and a shader which emulates a lit sphere. In the end, the quad was reduced to a single vertex –…

  • Animated IFS

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    This shows a combination of an IFS (iterated function system) and a particle system. In an IFS, points are attracted towards a fractal shape by iterating the positions over a set of affine transformations. The original algorithm starts with just one random point and plots its current position over a series of randomized transformations. In this example, I instead start out with a number of randomly distributed particles, which are…

  • Processing(JS)

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    Recently, I dusted off my copy of “The Computational Beauty of Nature” and started rediscovering this still wonderful book. The chapter about IFS fractals inspired me to do some experimenting with animated fractal shapes. An opportune moment to learn more about Processing! After playing with it for a few hours, I have to say, this is a wonderful programming environment for this kind of visual experiments. Virtually no boilerplate code,…

  • New demo

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    Added a new entry in the Demo section, showing how to do articulated figures in processing. Check it out: Articulated Structures Animation

  • Smoke Simulation

    Smoke Simulation

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    • Working prototype
    • C++ / Qt / OpenGL / GLSL
    • Fluid dynamics

  • Volumes and surfaces

    Volumes and surfaces

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    • Research prototype
    • C++ / Qt / OpenGL / GLSL
    • Volume visualization
    • Geometry processing

  • Qt and OpenGL programming in Python

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    Qt is a well-established framework for developing GUI applications in C++, and it has good support for OpenGL. It is relatively cumbersome, though, to set up a project for just a simple, experimental application. Moreover, even though Qt and OpenGL are portable, carrying over your project from, say, your Linux box to a Windows PC is not completely seamless, due to different compiler configurations, etc. Being a Friend of Python,…

  • Ocean water simulation

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    At Scanline VFX, we were doing a whole lot of CG water for the movie “Megalodon – Hai-Alarm auf Mallorca”. I leave it to you to rate the movie, but, hey: the project got me a credit on The Internet Movie Database. My part in this was the R&D on ocean water surface simulation. I ended up doing a variation of the FFT-based approach put forth by Jerry Tessendorf, and combined…