Continuing my dabbling in particles I’ve now created a flow field for them to move in. You know, to entertain the little critters. It’s fascinating how these flow fields acting on the particles give them the appearance of having flocking behaviour, with much less computational overhead (at least for non-quad tree optimized particles). Don’t look at the code. Your eyes might melt.
Click here for flow field applet
I’ve updated my aforementioned particle class, so it can now iterate through an array of attractors. Pretty simple stuff, but it can yield some interesting visuals when a few randomly placed attractors act on the particles. The code isn’t pretty and it will likely run slowly on older machines due to the high number of particles. I probably should look into a more efficient way than just running every single particle against the full array of attractors.
Click here for the applet
I spent some time this weekend writing my own particle and emitter class in Processing, to learn more about the language and the arcane lore that is particles. Ultimately I’d like to do some attraction and flocking behaviour with these particles. That would reaquaint me with vector math, a field of which my previous very limited comprehension is almost gone. I really regret not paying more attention in school.
The following applet is just a simple manifestation of my messing around with adding perlin noise to the vectors of the particles. It’s nothing special, but I think the “noisy order” looks interesting.
Click here for the noise grid applet
(The particle system is very bare bones. It doesn’t cull individual particles, but rather clears the whole array after some time. So there’s certainly room for improvements.)