Tech Lounge
00:08:13 · Chris Chinchilla, Evan Mezeske
[00:08:13] S0: Something like that. Anyway, [00:08:17] S1: Yeah. Definitely. I mean, Blender... So one sort of difficulty in building Anukari is that at least in the plugin space, there's like literally no prior art to draw on for a three d editor. Right? Like, that's just not a thing. But obviously in other software, that is a thing. And so Blender obviously was like one of the inspirations in terms of things like, you know, well, what's a typical hotkey for rotating a camera? [00:08:39] S0: Okay. Yeah. [00:08:40] S1: You know, stuff like that. But, yeah, certainly certainly that was an inspiration for some of the aspects of like the three d interface. [00:08:47] S0: And I mean, in some respects, you say not in software, but in the analog musical world. I mean, you talked about guitar strings, you know, you can take... There was actually something at Superbooth one year, which was basically like a live string that you could just sort of pull and pluck. Or you can take things like the prepared piano or just bottles. Three d objects do make noises even if they're not instruments per se. If I look at some of the screenshots here, they look way more complicated, but...
00:08:47 · Chris Chinchilla, Evan Mezeske
[00:08:47] S0: And I mean, in some respects, you say not in software, but in the analog musical world. I mean, you talked about guitar strings, you know, you can take... There was actually something at Superbooth one year, which was basically like a live string that you could just sort of pull and pluck. Or you can take things like the prepared piano or just bottles. Three d objects do make noises even if they're not instruments per se. If I look at some of the screenshots here, they look way more complicated, but... [00:09:23] S1: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they're they're complicated in the sense that there's like a bunch of moving parts, but in a lot of ways, the the little abstract masses are kinda more like, you know, atoms or something. Yeah. And so if you think of, a guitar string, it's made of a lot of atoms. Anukari is not gonna have, like, billions of atoms, but it's kinda like you're building something out of little specs. And then you get something. [00:09:47] S0: I think we've talked about it a lot. Are you able to give a demo? [00:09:51] S1: I can definitely attempt to. [00:09:53] S0: I feel like that might make everything make more sense to those watching, anyone not watching, you don't have to go watch It is because [00:10:02] S1: very difficult to explain Anukari without some kind of demo. So this is that Yeah. [00:10:06] S0: This is great. It's great. Yeah. [00:10:08] S1: Yeah. Okay. Well, let me open up just a really simple preset. [00:10:13] S0: Hopefully, the sound comes through. We'll see what happens. [00:10:15] S1: Let's give that a try.
00:10:15 · Evan Mezeske, Chris Chinchilla
[00:10:15] S1: Let's give that a try. [00:10:17] S0: Yeah. Yes. It does. Good. [00:10:19] S1: Yeah. Wonderful. Okay. I'm gonna stop this camera from rotating. So, yeah, this is like the... Sort of like the starting preset, the simplest thing possible. And, yeah, we heard how it sounds. Let's see. So just a really simple little sound, and there's some macros down here in the lower right so we can hear how those sound. [00:10:47] S0: And is the microphone just like where you're picking up the sound from, or does it have some physical effect on the sound as well? [00:10:55] S1: Yeah. Yeah. The microphone, it's basically [00:10:58] S0: What's the Okay.
00:10:58 · Chris Chinchilla, Evan Mezeske
[00:10:58] S0: What's the Okay. [00:10:59] S1: It's the position from which sound is being picked up, and it's also... It does... It affects the timbre where it's at because it's sort of picking up sound along this pink line, which is a a bit of a hard thing to explain, but moving the mics around will definitely change the sound a bit. On a simple preset like this, it may not make a lot of difference, but... Yeah. So you got this mass, and the the round one can move around. Yeah. And the the square ones are sort of tied down so that, like, you know, if you create a mass and don't tie down, it'll just fly off into space. Yeah. Like, if I... You know? And... Yeah. In this case, there's a mallet, a couple of microphones to pick up sound. Yeah. So my favorite demo is yeah. So we... Okay. My favorite demo is if we... Oh, yeah. If we just add this thing, so we hear how it sounds. Connect this. And you just get these crazy sounds because this thing, it's only connected with one spring. It's just gonna flail about kinda wildly. [00:12:12] S0: We've definitely made... I think as children, we've definitely made instruments that sound a bit like that. They kind of crash of springs. Yeah. [00:12:19] S1: Yeah. Exactly. You know, you get a lot of a lot of sounds that are sort of like flexing a piece of metal or something. Maybe like a saw. [00:12:29] S0: What are the bits at the top that look like buttons?
00:12:29 · Chris Chinchilla, Evan Mezeske
[00:12:29] S0: What are the bits at the top that look like buttons? [00:12:32] S1: Oh, yeah. So these are... These represent the macro knobs that are down here in the right. So, like, if I zoom in, if I turn the mute one, you can see it's turning that knob and the green line is kind of brightening and that means it's Yeah. It's doing something to that mass that it's connected to. [00:12:50] S0: It's only connected to that one mass. Okay. Yep. Yeah. Yep. I love this sort of degree of whimsy to it when you had one of the bodies disconnected and it had the little exclamation point. It made me think of, like, the the Sims or something. [00:13:06] S1: Yeah. Yeah. It's certainly, in some ways, borrowed from video game design. Yeah. Probably... Yeah. It probably should borrow more from video game design. Like, I could imagine if a video game designer created it, it'd be, like, all fun to use and exciting, and you'd click it and it'll do a little... Oh, you connected it. [00:13:24] S0: It sort of makes me think of my brief experiments with Unity. When you have these things just sort of floating. And you're like, how is this an object? And then, of course, you start to do magic with it. But until you do that, it's just like, what the it's just this thing floating in space. Is. Yeah. [00:13:41] S1: Exactly. [00:13:42] S0: It does talk about floating in space. We're in this sort of blue sky environment. Does the environment have any effect on the sound? [00:13:48] S1: The... No. The environment is purely visual. [00:13:50] S0: Okay.
00:13:50 · Chris Chinchilla, Evan Mezeske
[00:13:50] S0: Okay. [00:13:51] S1: And it's it's, like, quite customizable. There's all kinds of stuff. And, like, you can, you know, you can just have sort of like a gray background if that's what you're after. And the the three d models are also pretty customizable. [00:14:04] S0: Oh, really? [00:14:04] S1: Yeah. But... None of that... You know, people will be like, oh, you need to add a three d model that's like a wooden ball. And again, I have to sort of explain, like, the the balls aren't metal or wood or plastic. [00:14:15] S0: They're just balls. [00:14:16] S1: They're abstract points in space, basically. Yeah. But... Yeah. So then that's just sort of showing, you know, very simple thing. [00:14:24] S0: Oh, wow. [00:14:24] S1: But this is like a really fun demo. It's just grid. This started off as like a square grid of masses and springs, and then just stretch the corners out. And it sounds like but the most fun thing with this one is to go [00:14:49] S0: So just in case anyone is listening and not watching, this is like a sort of tight mesh of these balls, sort of stretched. It always makes me... It's gonna sound very horrible. It makes me think of Hellraiser. It's always like stretching this strange kind of distorted square. And as Evan is moving them around in a odd kind of like... Yeah. I don't even know how to describe it. It's... [00:15:21] S1: Yeah. It's like it's like kinda like taking a a tight drum head and maybe stretching it in some way.