On my way to developing my 3d tree script I first added a function to my basic particle system to cause the particles to branch. I went back and polished up the rendering of this as it looked interesting in 2d.
As usual, the script is built in Processing. Particles are generated by clicking on the screen and then they spread out pushing each other away. A slight perlin noise field gives the strands a more interesting motion and texture. Each frame is drawn successively on the screen, tracing the particles motion, without clearing the background. Each particle is rendered as a filled ellipse with a lighter transparent outline, creating a slightly 3d feel as the outlines get denser toward the edges.
To render the images with a higher resolution I created a global scale variable. The width and height of the applet are multiplied by this variable and then the scale function is called with that variable at the beginning of the draw loop. This lets me switch quickly between a manageable size to see what’s going on and the high res version. On my mac, entering expose fits the oversize window onto my screen. It’s far from a perfect system but it works. Exporting vectors is a much better rout, but this application is to complex for that to be feasible.
Now pictures. Click to see them bigger.
