While playing around with the magnetosphere code, I found myself wondering what it would look like if I restricted the movement of the particles to the surface of a sphere. Well, it ended up looking like I thought it would. Pretty, but ultimately not an improvement. It looked a bit like the magnetic structure bucky ball pieces from a couple months ago.
On a whim, I added a new vector which would cause the particles to swirl around the center of the sphere along a coded equator. I started to see hints of nice turbulence swirls so I kept at it. To help emphasize this effect, I modified the rotational vector to have three peaks so as you travel from the north pole to the south, you would pass through three bands of rotation. I also added a perlin noise vector to make the movements seem even more chaotic. Here is the most recent video.
Here is the result from the first go.
Turbulence from flight404 on Vimeo.
The brighter dots represent the positions of the main particles. In order to make it look a bit cloudier, I started using the midpoints between nearby points. If two points have a distance of less than 100, I draw a fuzzy texture between them whose size and alpha are inversely proportional to the distance. So as the distance between two particles decreases, the fuzzy texture gets larger and brigther. Because of this, the ‘clouds’ can appear and disappear as the main particles drift about.
Here is another version where I am using simple gradient ellipses.
Turbulence, cont. from flight404 on Vimeo.
I tried sticking the textured earth sphere in the middle of this mess of particles but the effect was a bit cheese. Maybe I will come back to it if I feel like pushing this towards a more realistic cloud layer, but Im thinking I will stick with the simplicity of the white on black for a while longer.
lovely. amazing work. my friend phil turned me on to magnetosphere, and it turns out you gus know my friend jim winters.
anyhoo – keep up the good work, and i can’t wait for the next version!
need any testers?
!~m
[...] Flight 404 Turbulence Cool videos of turbulence-like patterns. (tags: processing) [...]
Hey
I really admire the work you are doing and I have to say: you have an excellent taste in music. What kind of beats r you using here, if i may ask?
peace
moses
Thanks! I blame my friends for my taste in music. They have a good idea of what I would like and make great recommendations. The first video is ‘Autumn’ by Ganga recommended by my trainer-cum-DJ, Jeff Stallings. The second is ‘Deer Stop’ off of Goldfrapp’s first album, recommended by one of my business partners.
Is that what you were asking?
hi!
really like all the magnetosphere sketches.
hey, what about if you made the shape of the sphere sound reactive too? It could probably morph into an egg-shape… or wilder stuff.
cheers
So cool, man! I admire. Can you recommend a way to learn Processing?
[...] Wow. Flight404 created this with Processing: [...]
yes it is! i also downloaded the kari.o beats you have been using previously
what about a last.fm ad?, maybe I can also give you few tips there
http://www.last.fm/user/moses001
Wow that’s fantastic. Great work. I love how smooth that effect is on the spinning globe.
Hey!
I found your site while doing some work on flash / processing for my Art Graphics GCSE thanks for the inspiration and I included some of your work on my mood board pages because it’s so awesome! (I got an A* by the way)(this is UK stuff…). Anyway I love all your brilliant sound experiments in processing but I was wondering why you have only created the magnetosphere for iTunes plug-in and not all the others released to the public? Some of them are really amazing and I would use them a lot. Open source would be cool but I understand it’s a lot of your own work to put up for free.
Keep up the cool content / videos if check your site frequently,
Dan
Hi,
I have no clue about programming but that globe animation is absolutely beautiful! I haven’t seen anyone create such an organic thing with a computer before. I could watch it all day, and the music is perfect!
wow wow wow…WOW
i am a computer engineer and have done a good bit of programming but am new to processing. is there any way you could send me some sample code or a few links to sources on how to get started. i am interested in visuals that react to music similar to your visualizations. any help would be great! oh and your work is stunning!!!
The globe animation is sweet. Awesome job. And I would want to echo mike’s statement about maybe putting up some links about how to get started. Much appreciated.
this is great, i had some thoughts a while ago about particle distribution & behaviour on isosurfaces; keep going!
also a cool idea for generating particle volumes, which i played with flame fractal anims emitting off a moving plane, looks like the Doc Baily SPORE stuff but hard to get that kind of density without some tricks or 900GB of RAM
but this has some more intriguing possibilities as 3-space rather than UV coords…
Looks great, can we have it as an AVS or iTunes plug-in
?