Show HN: Psychedelic animation generator; (p)art of your next trip
35 comments
·March 13, 2025evanjrowley
IMO the most realistic generated psychedelic images were made by Google's Deep Dream 10 years ago. It seems like it's been mostly forgotten about after the advent of DALL-E, Midjourney, etc.
yojo
Agreed, it made some seriously wild stuff. Assuming you’re talking about this: https://research.google/blog/inceptionism-going-deeper-into-...
Here’s an example I generated in 2015:
https://www.wandereurope.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/drea...
Source image: https://www.wandereurope.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/mars...
mock-possum
Eh a lot of that ‘deep dreamy’ stuff ends up looking so same-same - I don’t need to look at endless various of ‘dog faces and insect body parts and glittering gemstones’ you know? I want to see actual weird stuff, bizarre genometry, a sense of space that’s mind-bending. Maximalism is not the be all end all of trippy visuals.
brokenmachine
Check this one out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGuBpKqtHdY
And this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dd3ZQOzyquo&t=385s
The AI generated ones are getting really good nowadays.
duskwuff
I believe this music video (Röyksopp - Impossible) was created with something along those lines:
bongodongobob
Eh, it's close but misses the mark if we're specifically trying to match psychedelic visuals. If it were more fractally and geometric sure, but the dogs and fish and shit just isn't it.
This is pretty bang on for a high dose - https://www.instagram.com/share/reel/BALFNVBS20
mgraczyk
Very cool animations, but they don't strike me as "psychedelic". A bit too smooth and unstructured.
evo_9
Very similar to my favorite trip toy of the 90s… rock ‘star’ Todd Rundgren’s Flowfazer. Quite mesmerizing for toddlers, too.
sixstring982
Very nice! Reminds me of something I built on Shadertoy a while back: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4ttGRf
OracB7
Nice! Where does one learn how to do this kind of thing (aside from the fractals)?
WASDx
https://iquilezles.org/ is a legend, see the articles and video tutorials.
Aside from shadertoy I use https://glslsandbox.com/ (for some reason it has https errors now). It's the same concept and it has a lot of submissions that are more basic than shardertoy where you can easily change lines and see what happens.
My intuition for these kind of shaders: They are just pure functions mapping an x,y coordinate to a color (optionally making use of time and cursor position). From this you can derive anything, like drawing a circle by choosing black or white depending on the distance from the center. There is a lot of intuition to gain and it's fun playing around, because as long as it compiles you will see something and you are likely to be surprised about what you accidentally made. Very rewarding.
w_for_wumbo
I love these projects, I've been really passionate about including our own sensory inputs into the experience, whether it's voice, webcam input or (in the future health metrics) in order to tailor the experience to the experiencers' desires.
Distilitron
Telefon tel aviv is nice, gfx is crap
talles
I miss Winamp
protocolture
So many llama's with unwhipped asses.
Y_Y
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wesley_Willis
Such a cool and influential musician.
DrSiemer
It will never as glorious as it was back in the day, but Milkdrop 3 was released in 2023 and works on any audio on your system.
01100011
Is it cross platform?
Best thing about milkdrop was that you could use a microphone. We brought a projector and screen to a music festival (HSMF) in '04 and had a jam circle in our camp where the visualizations would respond to the music we were making. Definitely a hit way back when before that sort of stuff became boring.
ferociouskite56
On Android the free ProjectM app hasn't been updated since 2022. Does anyone know how to install Milkdrop 3 on Kodi for Raspberry Pi or in F-Droid? Kodi is also on Android.
rtuin
This reminds me of Winamp too.
As a teenager I used to fiddle with the visualization editor for hours. Good fun!
dalemhurley
I love it, it would be awesome if the controls could slowly and randomly adjust themselves so over time the images transition.
newman8r
So cool! Would love to be able to easily make it full screen (maybe I'm missing the button for that)
Bookmarked
adzm
I really do appreciate the 90s, Video Toaster-esque[1] aesthetics
nimzoLarsen
This is so beautiful! The outputs are trippy and the music fits well.
Nice work
qwertox
I think AI tools like Stable Diffusion have a big potential.
Something along the lines of what Nexxus 604 is doing.
Sharing an open source project for creating psychadelic art -- using liquid motion, distorted shapes, shadows and light. This tool works in real-time in the browser using webgl shaders.
This project was inspired by drum & bass / acid techno music, and 90s rave posters.
Use this to create art for a music video, concert posters, stylized animations in creative projects, or simply to enjoy alongside some fine music.
Use the detailed control menu (top-right) to set a custom canvas size, adjust animation speed, control pattern and colours, etc...
You can export your creation as an image or video afterwards.
How this works: this tool uses WebGL shaders to create a real-time animation (with a trippy liquid / shadow / blur aesthetic).
The animation is created using a random seed position and mixes in random noise (fractal brownian motion, 3D simplex noise), so each time you re-run it you're creating a unique piece of art.
Github repo: https://github.com/collidingScopes/liquid-shape-distortions
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I hope you enjoy the visuals. I'd love to hear any feedback or suggestions.