The Rain Machine
A tool that started out to simulate rain, but it turned out to be much more useful.
Begun: Fall 2006
This tool draws 2D shapes in a window that can be animated. Additionally, audio can then be attached to the shape. The audio will move around in a quadraphonic audio field with the shape. There are additional discrete controls for each shape for setting volume which is relative to the shape’s size, filtering which is associated with the shape’s color, clip size and speed of the shape’s re-drawing. By using multiple shapes with short clips of an audio file, the effect can simulate rain. When this tool becomes more interesting is when arbitrary non-rain-like audio clips are used. There is additional functionality for creating and mixing presets to create longer sequences of animated movements. A clip of audio generated with this tool is available below as well as a zip archive of the Max files used in the tool.
Ideas for the future:
- make it more robust, better audio handling/loading
- create some physical modeling controls for the drawing surface
