Skip to content

Liquid effect

Turing Skin

Turing Skin is a liquid video effect in FRCTL, the browser VJ studio. Grows a fine Turing pattern and wears it as skin — the picture keeps its shape but gains fingerprint ridges that push it around as they form.

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 Turing Skin free All effects

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

The eye-in-triangle illustration covered in a fine embossed maze of bubbly ridges, its original colours intact — Turing Skin, default settings

What Turing Skin does

Grows a fine fingerprint-ridge Turing pattern once, when it's switched on, then lets it settle and hold still while the footage moves beneath. The ridges have no colour of their own: they emboss the picture and push it off the crests into the valleys. Scale runs from fingerprint up to brain coral, Warp sets the push, Emboss the lighting, and Feed and Kill dots versus lines.

Using Turing Skin

Where it works: Texture for portraits, reptile and alien looks, and cover art that should feel tactile without changing colour. Once formed the pattern holds still, so it layers under moving footage without flicker.
With the music: Keep audio off Feed and Kill: pushed too far this skin fades and won't return until the clip restarts. Warp and Emboss are safe, so B3 (bass body) on Warp makes the ridges shove the picture on bass notes.
Starting point: Scale hard left, Feed centre, Kill centre, Growth three-quarters, Warp a quarter, Emboss centre, then let the ridges finish forming before touching Kill.

Controls

Scale: Ridge spacing, from fingerprint up to something closer to brain coral.
Feed: How fast fresh substrate arrives. Low breaks the ridges into dots, high runs them together into unbroken lines.
Kill: How fast the pattern is taken back. Trades solid maze for open stipple. This skin is never re-seeded, so pushed hard enough either way it will fade out and stay gone until the clip restarts.
Growth: How far the pattern advances each frame while it is still forming.
Warp: How hard the ridges drag the picture. At zero the skin sits on top of it; up high the frame is pushed around by its own texture.
Emboss: Lighting across the ridge faces, which is what makes the skin look raised rather than printed.
Blend: Weight of the skin over the bare picture.
Key light: Which corner the light on the skin comes from.

Pairs well with Turing Skin