Take the picture apart, and fly through it

Take the picture apart, and fly through it

FORGE has always turned a picture into a scene you fly through. In 2.6 the picture itself comes apart.

Point Cloud rebuilds it as a grid of points and pushes each one into real depth by the depth map, so the Virtual Camera flies between them instead of across a flat plane. And the cloud plays: strike a note and the points inside its disc come at you, pressure holds them out, slide opens the cone wider, pitch bend moves it sideways. Choose hard Dots, soft Splats, or Glyphs that stamp a character per point from a set you type in yourself, so the image comes back written in your own letters.

Spin turns the whole cloud on a free axis, winding up while you play and settling back upright in silence. Cells takes the other road and leaves the frame whole, redrawing it cell by cell as ASCII, halftone or dither over any source. Both need WebGL2.

CASCADE impacts combine. Ten independent layers at the key line instead of one choice, so a shower of sparks can sit inside a fountain. An Own color switch gives every armed layer one shared colour, and note ribbons gain a Chrome finish next to Diamond and Glass.

And once you are done flying, 2.6 removes the last thing you needed in order to play at all. Typing Keys puts two manuals under your hands on the computer keyboard, eight white keys each, matched by physical key position so QWERTY, QWERTZ and AZERTY all play the same shapes. Space is the sustain pedal, Shift accents a note, and with DRIFT armed every typed note leaves as a full MPE voice. A new Play pill holds both ways to play without a controller, typing and Mouse Mode.

Also new

• A fifth Expression Overview mode, Rack: every source drawn as the piece of studio gear you would read it on, and every row can be a knob, a meter or a bar
• Four views in the MIDI Stream Log: Events, Notes, Channels and Stats, each log remembering its own, with eight message types in colours you can edit
• MIDI Learn now reaches the FORGE Conductor: Enable, Range and Cycle, so a fader box or a pedal can drive it live
• 25 keys as a fourth keyboard size, next to 88, 61 and 49
• The sustain pedal is read properly: switch, continuous, or detected automatically, with an invert for the normally closed ones
• DRIFT's power switch belongs to presets, snapshots and Panic now
• Global Snapshots reorder by dragging, and export or delete only the rows you mark
• Steadier tempo from MIDI Clock, feeding recording tempo maps and DRIFT timing
• ⊘ All Off reaches CASCADE and AURA, so a look can start from an empty frame