What is kodisein?
VJ Tool
Kodisein was written and designed for one purpose mainly: to
be a VJ (VideoJockey) tool. That means: it should be used in discotheques
to supplement the music with matching visuals.
This intention had some influence on the kind of visuals you
can produce with the program.
Because it's designed to be used live and interactively, there
is no timeline or a similar concept integrated, which makes it
difficult to tell a story.
But you can design and display abstract scenes (collections of
objects in 3d space) and interactively animate them to match the
rhythm of the music. You can change in real-time almost every
attribute (color, texture, transformation, lighting, etc. ) of
the objects in your pre-designed scenes.
Your computer's keyboard serves as the equivalent to the DJ's
mixer. Using the mouse enables you to do the visual equivalent
to 'scratching'.
3D OpenGLego visuals constructor
You may use kodisein to create and explore new design ideas.
After creating a static prototype you could use the animation
feature to explore the parameter space of various attributes to
optimize the overall design.
Graphical Programming
The program is essentially a graphical wrapper for a small subset
of the OpenGL interface. In other words: by using kodisein you
are graphically constructing a small 'program' which will later
be interpreted and translated to function calls of the OpenGL
library.
This abstract view opens a lot of possibilities for further usage
of the program. You could maybe use it to test some aspects of
your OpenGL engine or do a rapid prototype of an idea you have
without the necessity to write and compile a program.
What is it not?
First of all: it is not stable!
The program is still in alpha stadium: there are some known bugs
and many of the features are unfinished or unpolished.
You should know that it comes with no warranty whatsoever.
Furthermore, the XML format of the project files is very likely
to change, so the files you might create with this version most
probably won't work in future versions without some editing by
hand.
Don't tell me, you haven't been warned ;-)
It is not easy to use!
As mentioned above, kodisein has some resemblance with a graphical
programming language and therefore it will take some time to know
how to use it.
It will be easier if you have a basic understanding of Computer
Graphics and the underlying mathematics in general and OpenGL
in particular.
Because kodisein is hardly comparable to any program you know,
you should read the manual before
starting to use it. It is also a good idea to read the tutorials.
It is not platform independent
Currently, kodisein runs on Mac OS X and Windows only.
It is written in C++ and uses the STL, OpenGL, GLUT, SDL and
SLD_image libraries.
Although these libraries are available on most platforms it will
certainly need some work to port it to another OS.
Fortunately, it should be quite easy to compile it on other UNIX
flavors.
>>> Manual
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