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Light & lasers effect

Neon Topography

Neon Topography is a neon and laser effect in FRCTL, the browser VJ studio. Animated procedural contour map over the photo. Drifting neon iso-lines (brighter every fifth).

Runs live on video, images, a camera or generated art. Stack it with any other effect, and route LFOs, envelopes or any of ten audio bands to its controls so it moves with the music.

Try Neon Topography free All effects

The untouched demo art: an eye inside a triangle over wavy teal, blue and peach lines — Source

The eye-in-triangle art covered in dense rainbow contour lines in cyan, lime, pink and violet — Neon Topography, default settings

What Neon Topography does

Lays a moving contour map over the picture, traced from its own drifting noise terrain rather than from the image, with every fifth line thicker and whiter like the index lines on a survey map. The lines add light and leave the art underneath. Terrain packs more hills into the frame, Flow speeds the drift, and Variety sets how far the colour steps between bands.

Using Neon Topography

Where it works: Techno and ambient loops that need a constant slow crawl, and map-like backgrounds for a lyric card or tour poster. Because the terrain ignores the picture, it layers over any footage without tracing it.
With the music: It crawls on the clock, not the beat. Route B3 bass body to Glow so the contours brighten on bass notes, and a slow LFO on Tint walks the palette through the bands over a phrase.
Starting point: Terrain at a quarter, Flow at a quarter, Glow at centre, Variety hard left for a single-colour survey map, Direction on Left.

Controls

Terrain: Elevation field spatial scale.
Flow: Drift speed of the FBM advection layers.
Glow: Contour line emissive strength.
Tint: Where the contour palette starts on the wheel.
Variety: How far the colour walks between one contour band and the next. Hard left is a single colour.
Direction: Which way the terrain flows.
Speed: Rate of the effect motion. Centre is the authored speed, hard left a tenth of it.

Pairs well with Neon Topography