How to emulate glowing ember in CUE2

When I started off with CUE, I managed after putting in quite a bit of work to emulate the sense of a glowing ember underneath the main keys of the keyboard. I used some kind of "ripple" effects between the keys.

The results were not that good though. The main issue with it was that the glowing was periodic which looked quite unnatural.

Since the update to CUE2 I haven't managed to pull it off at all.

What I want is to make each key randomly transition between different colors, be it between red, dark orange, bright orange, perhaps some yellow. Or different hues of the same color or ... And I want there to be some kind of ripple effect, i.e. if one key suddenly increases in "intensity" or heat or whatever you'd like to call it, adjacent keys should be partially affected too.

Has anyone managed to pull this off in CUE?

It would have been the best if it was possible to write scripts, be it Python, Ruby, JavaScript, C# etc where one can code the behaviour of selected lights, use random number generators and simulate the physics of glowing ember.

Hey, i have one called fireplace that i've attached. I like it a lot, sounds similar to what you want, I got it online. If you look directly from above it looks like fire/coals

Doesn't have all the effects you want obviously but a great starting point to build from. I added white keys cause i thought it looked fitting.

FirePlace.cueprofile

It would have been the best if it was possible to write scripts, be it Python, Ruby, JavaScript, C# etc where one can code the behaviour of selected lights, use random number generators and simulate the physics of glowing ember.

yeah that can be done in the SDK in a straightforward manner, but you need to come up with the function that would define the look of the embers you are looking for.

You may want to take a look at some video of a fireplace or whatever and color pick those oranges and reds then figure out the time between their intensities to your liking. the sdk lets you address specific keys as well as "logical layouts" so i think that means like G keys are left of tab etc (and that is also important as not everyones kbs are the same).

I feel like you could fudge it in CUE tho pretty good but it sounds like you tried that...

Hey, i have one called fireplace that i've attached. I like it a lot, sounds similar to what you want, I got it online. If you look directly from above it looks like fire/coals

 

Doesn't have all the effects you want obviously but a great starting point to build from. I added white keys cause i thought it looked fitting.

Looks nice i just tried it. My lighting controller is so fried on this board tho its embarrassing

FirePlace.cueprofile

It doesn't have to be that complicated. If I were to simulate this I would use some kind of mean reversing stochastic process (just look up 'mean reversion' and 'Wiener process'). The "mean reversion" means that the further away the intensity is from the mean, the bigger a correction towards that mean will happen at next time step. Stochastic processes are easy to simulate if you have a random number generator.

Let us assume that each light is on a square grid, then one could also add the heat contribution from a Moore neighbourhood at each time step.

On top of it, one could add a slight ripple effect that would create a ripple from say left to right, as if a gust of wind hit the ember. The ripple must be rather fast though in order to resemble reality. The ripple f(x) = tanh(x) - tanh(x+L) that is swiftly pushed over the keys and L is the duration of that gust of wind.

The intensity could be a floating point value between 0 and 1 that could map onto a range of RGB values that by default is something that looks like the color intensity range of ember but could be any desired color spectrum.

This would work if say I could access the values of the lights from a script API and then let a loop iterate each time-step indefinitely.

I'm unable to open that .cueprofile file. Im on CUE 2.15 and the latest is 2.20. perhaps this is a version compatibility issue. I will attempt an update soon.