The Emu's Nest

Firstly, if you have come here looking for information regarding emus, or any other flightless birds, then you are out of luck. This web site currently provides access to VirtuaGirl full screen scenes developed by "The Emu" (VGHD username TheEmu). As The Emu is a very poor artist the emphasis for these scenes is on their technical aspects rather than on producing beautiful setting for the performances.

The scenes are provided for use with the VGHD software, please feel free to download and use them as you will. You may modify them if you wish, or just use the ideas for scenes of your own, but in either case please include a reference to The Emu, and preferably let me know what you have done..

The available scenes currently comprise four three main groups, those based on Totem's "Paris Penthouse Club" scenes, those created by The Emu to experiment with the scene system and those based on fragment shaders downloaded from ShaderToy.com. In addition the site hosts a few scenes that have been contributed by others, including those who have been so kind as to make up for The Emu's lack of artistic skills by providing suitable settings for his efforts, thereby greatly enhancing them.

The Emu's modified Paris Penthouse Club scenes are simply variations on the examples provided by Totem when the VGHD software is installed. The Emu's variations include

Improving the visibility of the floor shows by modifying the foreground
Changing the two raised dancing platforms to form a "flying bridge"
Modifying some of the seating to provide a couch for the performers
Zooming in on the bar at the back of the room
Increasing the number of active performers
Introducing "chorus lines" of clones

The "Emu's Experiments" scenes on the other hand represent the process by which The Emu has investigated several aspects of scene generation including

Various ways of animating the performer's clips
Using twin performers or larger numbers of clones
Investigating ways to use multiple cages
Producing a few novelty clocks
Using GPU fragment shaders

Rather than being finished products these experimental scenes are in some ways more basic, usually not including any background, but are internally more complex and concentrate on showing the effects that can be produced by the use of various features of the software, discovering problems that may encountered and determining how to overcome them. They therefore tend come in series that examine each aspect in detail ranging from the most basic to more complex usages. In many cases the comments in the .scn files can be used as a sort of tutorial. However, even in their current state, many of these experimental scenes make effective screen savers.

Perhaps of most interest among these "experiments" are

the clocks, using pole dancers as clock hands
the final forms of the experiments with carousels
the use of fragment shaders for psychedelic backgrounds
the use of fragment shaders to generate fractal backgrounds

In the case of the fractal backgrounds these are not previously generated static images but are generated "on the fly". In some of the fractal scenes the control parameters are time varying resulting in continuously changing backgrounds. The detail in these fractals is limited by the use of the GPU's native floating point which limits the zoom factor, but the ability to actively zoom or fly over the Mandelbrot set or to continuously vary the control parameters for a Julia set more than makes up for this shortcoming.

The scenes based on shaders from ShaderToy.com and GlslSandbox.com each comprise a single performance in front of a dynamic background provided by a fragment shader obtained from the corresponding web site. These scenes vary greatly in complexity, and the load that they put on the host computer may strain low end systems. The Emu has done nothing to these shaders except the bare minimum to get them running with the VGHD software - all credit for them belongs to the original shader creators and these are identified as best as I can in the scene names.