Anthony Mattox Interaction Design + Digital Art

Back at the old particle system I’ve been enhancing the interaction. In the applet you can now easily create and remove particles and links. Particles can be dragged and multiple particles can be selected. Right now everything is controlled with keypresses, but I plan to build an interface to easily switch between tools and to modify particle and spring properties as well as environmental properties. When its a little closer to finished I’ll post it into my interactive site.

In these images, springs are drawn in purple and forces are drawn as blue lines, stronger forces are darker. Drawing the forces is a little unnecessary but it creates interesting patterns. Which is, at this point, all this application really does.

What is particularly interesting is the way structures move. In the image below, a radial structure is dragged by its central point. The whole mass distorts into a cardioid shape. It eventually collapses into chaotic motion. Moving any particle in an interconnected set creates waves through the rest of the system.

In addition to interparticle forces, all the objects in this script are effected by a Perlin Flow Field. Two dimensional Perlin noise evolves through time and sits behind the particle system as a grid of forces. These forces are applied to each particle based on it’s exact coordinates each frame, before any other functions. The system creates some very elegant effects as smaller (lighter) particles get sorted out and complex force structures create swirling spirals and channels of flowing particles.

This is the result of my attempt to create a variation of my line wave script which waves in two dimensions. I started anew and used some particle systems I’d started a while ago. With a spring class which holds two particles together all the particles could be chained together. Hiding the particles and springs and wrapping the particle loop in a shape method with a curve vertex for each created a wobbling line. Without a background function the line continually drew each frame on the screen.

It’s not exactly what I had in mind, but I like how it turned out. I have a few different variations I may post and will keep playing with it. I’ll also have a few desktop wallpapers available from this script soon as soon as I decide how to set up and organize a wallpaper section on my site.

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Although there are a couple particle system libraries available for Processing I thought I’d build my own anyway. For practice, a better understanding of what’s going on, and more control over the details. With a little help from Dan Shiffman I began working on one a little while ago but never quite finished it. Trying to extend my Wave script to flow fully in two dimensions, a particle system seemed like a good tool. All the particles repel each other and have realistic motion with force, acceleration, and velocity vectors. I also added a spring class and a few other little tools.

On the way I was distracted a few times and made a few other generative sketches. This one simply creates particles which slowly fade. A curve along all of the points with a very low opacity creates the brushy textures.

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