Installing Loops

Loops is an artwork by OpenEnded Group that has been released under an open source license as part of an experimental project funded by the Mellon Foundation to explore new ways of preserving digital artworks. The impetus behind very website on which you are reading this — the open-sourcing of Field — came from this project.

Loops serves as a medium size project build on and with Field and as yet is the best example of a complex non-photorealistic renderer built with Field's graphics system. It may well be the most sophisticated open source non-photorealistic rendering platform out there, and, while it continues to be radically under-documented, Loops's source code is the best place to start.

Getting it

You need to choose between the binary snapshot (easiest) or the development tree (fasted upaded).

Here's the binary snapshot.

Alternatively, for 'development' you will need four components to install Loops:

• Firstly, a working field installation! (always use the most recent version).
• Secondly, the binary motion capture files that are too large to put into a Mercurial repository.
• Thirdly, you'll need to clone the following repositories into a new directory:

hg clone http://openendedgroup.com:8003 loopsroot
hg clone http://openendedgroup.com:8004 loopsworkspace

• Finally, you'll need to take a look at the installation.rtf file that's part of the loopsroot directory.

This code represents the artwork that was show on February 26th, 2008, modified to track changes in the current Field code-base and to run on the latest NVidia 8800 graphics cards on Apple. This is a complex code-base connected to Field, but we're happy to help you install it. As always this is a work-in-progress release. Email marc <at> openendedgroup <dot> com with any trouble, bugs, ideas and feedback.