The long wait is over!

vvvv gamma 2020.3 public previews now include VL.Stride, the new 3d rendering library, based on the opensource Stride 3d engine. You be the judge, but spoiler: this is rather huge!

Massive thanks go out to all early accessors who helped us uncover and fix countless buggers that you no longer have to run into. So this is also on your behalf. You're welcome!

Status

All of the basics are now in place. Find your favorite among these:

• Primitives: Plane, Box, Sphere, Cylinder, Cone, Capsule, Donut and Teapot
• Instancing: Via spread of transforms, other entities or buffers
• Lights: Ambient, Directional, Point, Spot, Projector, Skybox
• Shadows: On by default, configurable in quality/resource-consumption
• Materials: Highly configurable PBR workflow through a large set of nodes, incl. easy normalmapping, displacements,...
• Textures: From file, video, Spout, Skia, HTML or renderer
• TextureFX: Basic selection available, more to come
• Texture Feedback: Yes please!
• Texture Readback: Absolutely, think pipet,...
• ShaderFX: Experimental nodes to patch shaders visually
• PostFX: Highly configurable via set of nodes, think: depth-of-field, bloom, ambient-occlusion, ...
• Dynamic Meshes: Generate meshes using vertex- and indexbuffers on CPU
• Shaders: Pixel, Vertex, Geometry, Compute. Write your own using full syntax highlighting in VisualStudio with hot-reload
• Assets from file: Load textures and models directly from file
• Assets from Stride Game Studio: Prepare assets and complete scenes in game studio
• Windowing: Easy handling of multiple windows (and cameras)
• Misc: Render Skia and HTML content directly onto the screen (ie. no texture-pass needed)

To give you an idea, here is a random collection of screenshots of what earlyaccessors have created with this already.

Still missing

To give you a heads-up, here are things you might expect already but are yet to come:

• Loading models does not bring all their materials and animations in yet. To get a models materials showing automatically, you need to load them as an AssetModel via an extra Stride project. Animations are not yet supported.
• Simple Text Rendering: for now best done via Skia or HTMLRenderers
• Physics nodes are available in the Experimental section, meaning you can use them but still we want to give them one more round of refinement
• VR support is still to come. Stride supports it, we just haven't exposed it yet properly
• Things you'd do with the most popular contributions InstanceNoodles, DX11.Particles and FieldTrip are still missing a corresponding functionality

And then some more, but the above should be the most obvious ones you'll stumble upon.

How to get started?

Open the Helpbrowser (F1) and check out the explanations, howtos and examples. Remember the preview status, ie. those are not yet in their best shape. But they should help you find your way.

And if you really got nothing better to do in the week of October 2nd to 8th, then consider joining us for NODE20 where we have the following series of workshops dedicated to getting you started with VL.Stride:

• Introduction to vvvv, VideoFX & Compositing by Maria Heine
• Realtime graphics with Stride 3D – The Fundamentals by joreg
• Patching Materials by robotanton
• Beyond Sound and Visual by dottore
• VL.Stride Deepdive by tonfilm
• A preview to ShaderFX by tonfilm
• Working with the Stride GameStudio by Marian Dziubiak

A tickets costs 50€ and gives you full access to all of the above and so many more workshops and their recordings.

Thanks

A couple of people believed in the development of VL.Stride from the beginning and substantially supported its development. We bow before you:

• Marshmellow Laser Feast
• schnellebuntebilder
• m box
• Refik Anadol
• Jarrad Hope

bonjourbonjour,

Following tests from a few months ago regarding publishing your shiny VL nugets with Github Actions, we now have a dedicated action ready to be used!

Nuget what?

For more informations on nugets, please refer to this section of the Gray Book.

Github what?

Github actions are small scripts with a specific purpose, allowing you to automate tasks on your repos. They are actually the building blocks of what's called a workflow : you chain several actions one after the other in your own small script, and decide under which condition the workflow is triggered (a new commit on master, a new tag, etc).

There are already tons of actions allowing you to do all sorts of things from creating issues to running unit tests, and even make phone calls with a predefined text!

The PublishVLNuget action

This action allows you to easily do the following tasks :

• Build your Visual Studio solution, if your plugin has one
• Download a package icon from an external url if you don't want to commit it to your repos every time
• Pack your nuget either using a nuspec or a csproj file
• Publish it to nuget.org (or any other feed)

In other words, you just have to push your code/patches and nuspec to github, and the script takes care of bringing it to nuget.org for you.

You can find the list of input parameters the action expects here.

How do I setup a workflow?

To get started with workflows, head over to the Github documentation.

Use cases

The action can adapt to many different scenarios. Let's cover three cases so you get an idea of how the action works, and how to adapt it to your needs.

My plugin does not have a visual studio solution

So your plugin solely consists of one (or many) VL documents and some help patches, plus your nuspec file that describes how your package will be structured.

(...) 
     - name: Publish VL Nuget
       uses: vvvv/PublishVLNuget@1.0.28
       with:
         nuspec: deployment/VL.MyPlugin.nuspec
         nuget-key: ${{ secrets.NUGET_KEY }}

Here, we are just using the nuspec and nuget-key inputs of the action.

My project has a Visual Studio solution and no nuspec file

Your csproj file can also describe how your nuget will be packed. In that case, simply omit the nuspec input. Note that if you provide a nuspec file anyway, it will take priority over your csproj.

I want to push to another nuget feed

By default, the action will push your package to nuget.org. You can simply use the nuget-feed input to push to a different feed.

Regarding external icons

I want to use an external icon, and my plugin has a nuspec file

The icon must be downloaded to an existing folder in your repo. We suggest you simply download it to its root :

(...)
- name: Publish VL Nuget
    uses: vvvv/PublishVLNuget@1.0.28
    with:
    (...)
    icon-src: https://wwww.url.to/nugeticon.png
    icon-dst: ./nugeticon.png

Here, we ask the Github Action to download the icon from our URL and place it at the root of the repo.

Then, in the file section, your nuspec file must reference it from where the action will download it (src attribute) and place it wherever you like (target attribute), making sure target matches where the metadata section expects it.

(...)
    <metadata>
        (...)
        <icon>icon\nugeticon.png</icon>
    </metadata>
    <files>
        (...)
        <file src="..\nugeticon.png" target="icon\">
    </files>
(...)

I want to use an external icon and my plugin does not have a nuspec file

You can setup an icon for your project inside Visual Studio. The tricky part here is that you'll have to specify a path to a file that does not exist yet, since the Action will take care of downloading it later on. This can feel weird since Visual Studio's UI gives your a Browse button for you to pick a file. Simply fill the path manually to match the icon-src property of your workflow file.

For instance, your workflow file would look like this:

(...)
- name: Publish VL Nuget
    uses: vvvv/PublishVLNuget@1.0.28
    with:
    csproj: src\Whatever\Whatever.csproj
    icon-src: https://wwww.url.to/nugeticon.png
    icon-dst: ./deployment/nugeticon.png
    nuget-key: ${{ secrets.NUGET_KEY }}

and your VS package settings :

Thanks for reading, hope you'll enjoy using this one! If you are stuck or want more precision, don't hesitate to shout in the comments or in the forums.

Cheeeerz

Helo evvvveryone!

Are you teaching or studying vvvv in an educational institution? Want to join NODE20 with a group of students? Please get in touch, we want to offer you a discount!

NODE20 features 25+ online vvvv workshops on various topics covering the needs of beginners and advanced users. This means the week of October 2nd to 8th will be a very good moment to divvvve deep. Besides, there'll also be a rather fine conference program you'll not want to miss.

vvvv in education

You may say we're biased, but we believe that vvvv is one of the more suitable ways to get people in touch with topics like creative coding, generative design, computer graphics, interaction design, data visualization, computer vision, physical computing, machine learning and similar. This is even more true for the all-new vvvv gamma. Why? Here is a list of pros and cons with a focus on use in education:

Pros

• It is free for non-commercial/educational use without any restrictions or registration
• It is quick and easy to install
• Its visual live-programming approach allows you to get to results and iterate quickly
• It comes with a HelpBrowser that makes it easy to find tutorials and documentation on various topics
• It is easily extendable with custom nodes by writing standard C# code or using almost any .NET nuget
• All of its libraries are open-source, meaning they can be explored, learned from and extended
• It uses industrie standard programming concepts known from object-oriented programming that once understood, can also be applied in other programming languages
• The core developers and fine community of users offer direct help support via chat and the forum basically 24/7/365

Cons (status fall 2020)

• It runs on Windows only
• It cannot export to mobile, the web or microcontrollers

Have more? Let us know in the comments.

Hope to see you at NODE!

Who Takuma Nakata
When Mon, Sep 28th 2020 - 17:00 until Wed, Sep 30th 2020 - 20:00
Where Gray Area Online, United States

In this two-day workshop, learn to create generative graphics using node based programming language called vvvv. During this session you will learn to build an immersive visual system, by applying various visual effects on a 3D animated character exported using Adobe Mixamo. This session will be a practical introduction to vvvv, with focus on 3D graphics and using data. For those who are interested in creating immersive visuals through code with the flexibility of creating interactive, physical experiences, this workshop is the perfect place to start.

Workshop Logistics Dates:
Monday September 28 &
Wednesday September 30

Times: 5 – 8pm PST

Cost: $120 Experience

Level: Beginner to Intermediate.

Requirements:
• Windows PC with a microphone input and a mouse (both necessary for this workshop)
• Install vvvv beta 64bit version.

Workshop Outline • Introduction to vvvv
• Installation vvvv and packs
• Importing Animated 3D character
• Tweaking vertices
• Making it audio reactive
• Learning DX11 Particle Packs
• Applying particle effects to the character
• Introducing https://visualprogramming.net/

Online Workshop This 6 hours online workshop will be held as two 3 hours workshop over two days via video webinar. We will have an online community chat to share your questions during and beyond the workshop. Please contact us if you have any additional questions at creativedev@grayarea.org.

https://grayarea.org/workshop/generative-graphics-workshop-with-vvvv/