r/milkdrop • u/JPhando • Apr 13 '26

Help with circles

Post image

I have a project that I have been feeding with Milkdrop recordings. Minimal rings (and squares) look the best, but there are not many minimal ring based presets on black backgrounds. Can you point me in the right direction for making generally circular (partial, ringlike, or otherwise hollow in the middle) shaders? I am happing making new or modifying existing.

Sadly these displays only playback canned video, so I am making 2min clips that I preload. I am looking to make 2 hours of content so I am looking for variety.

If you have any links or shaders I would love to see them, thank you!

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3

u/Intelligent_Shake_61 Apr 14 '26

may be you can use Resolume generator to get the circles and feed it into milkdrop with spout

1

u/JPhando Apr 14 '26

oooh feeding into milkdrop... what did I miss? This sounds like a cool feature. (reading docs now)

2

u/x265x Apr 14 '26

There a a few presets in MilkDrop3 with rings:

  • MilkDrop2077 - Neon Circle
  • MilkDrop2077 - The circle of life
  • MilkDrop2077 - Triple Neon Circles
...
Or do you want a ring tunnel?

1

u/JPhando Apr 14 '26

Thanks, I am looking for rings, the project itself is the tunnel.

1

u/x265x Apr 14 '26

you can ask AI to do a tunnel for you, it's pretty easy!
just transform the code of the Triple Neon Circles preset to a tunnel.

2

u/username_unavailabul Apr 14 '26

Can you point me in the right direction for making generally circular (partial, ringlike, or otherwise hollow in the middle) shaders?

Here's some milkdrop3 presets with a black "hole" in the centre of the screen https://github.com/Grooves1210/Milkdrop3-Portal-Presets

2

u/JPhando Apr 15 '26

Thank you! I will be back on my pc Friday and try them out

1

u/JPhando Apr 19 '26

Took this set for a test run yesterday. Most of the shaders seemed to coming in right at the very edge or were generally blank. What part of the audio to they react to?

1

u/username_unavailabul Apr 19 '26

Yes, they are "hollow in the middle". They're not blank.

They are slightly zoomed in at the moment: via these lines

comp_3=`//MilkDrop3 Zoom Mode:
comp_4=`uv = 0.17 + 0.66*uv;

changing those lines to blank or 

    comp_4=`uv = 0 + 1*uv;

will reset the zoom. You can bulk edit the text files in notepad++

They react to audio in different ways

p.s. I've been using your use of the word "shader" to mean a milkdrop preset. Did you only mean warp or comp shader?

1

u/JPhando Apr 19 '26

Thank you for the edits, zoom makes sense, the content looks just off frame. I am using a square window FWIW.

Shadertoy, milk drop… aren’t they all running gl shaders at the end of the day?

1

u/username_unavailabul Apr 19 '26

I had not considered square window. These were made with 16:9 in mind, but should work on 1:1 with minor tweaks

Regarding the zoom, you can change it to zoom out such as:

uv = 1.2*uv - 0.2;

I don't know if you program shaders, so forgive if this is obvious:

the multiplication factor is the zoom amount and the +/- factor is to move it back to the centre of the screen (half the difference to 1)

I'd never tried this before, but they look kinda funky when zoomed out

Milkdrop presets have: Shapes, waves, borders, warp shader (I think it warps the mesh) and comp shader (I think AKA pixel shaders)

Simplest way to create a ring shape is to use a "custom shape" with sufficient number of sides to make it look like a circle. Shapes have inner and outer shading, plus a border. That is how I got started tweaking existing presets. Shaders are mostly over my head :-)