Check out Flock!

A year ago I attended a 3 week college-like event called Missouri Scholar’s Academy. I showed several of my peers there some of the different demos I had here on bluethen.com, and they seemed to like it.

The teacher suggested that I should try and simulate a flock of birds. I told him that there were several implementations out there already, but I gave it a go anyways.

I wrote and based the algorithm off of a blog post by Harry Brundage. The original simulation could handle about 200 birds or “boids” before the frame rate drops noticeably.

In the past week I’ve returned to the flocking algorithm and did a few improvements. Right now it can handle about 1000 boids, and, with the OpenGL renderer, it can handle 1500 and up.
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Click here to try out Ragdoll Animator

Very crude example animation: here. Copy/paste it into the textarea at the animator page, then click “Load from textarea.”

For the past two weeks I’ve been working on a simple Verlet-based Animator. Everytime you click “Add Frame” (or press spacebar), the animator tries to predict your next frame by apply motion to the stickman. You can even simulate it in real time by holding spacebar and grabbing the stickman and flinging him around. There’s a lot of other cool things you can do here, but I’ll leave it to you to find out.

Ragdoll Animator, like most of my stuff, was programmed in Processing. Instead of compiling it as a Java Applet this time I instead used Processing.js.

The creation of Ragdoll Animator was made with the help of some of the Processing.js dev team, especially Pomax, who was willing to tolerate my countless questions about code design.

For animators: My animation example is very crude and I’m certain other people are more capable than me at making something neat. Paste your animations at PasteBin and tweet them! I’ll be sure to include animations tweeted in later blog posts.

Source code info after the break.
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Click here to see How to Make a Fabric Simulator

Click here to see How to Make a Fabric Simulator Part 2

Yesterday and today I made some long needed changes to Curtain‘s code. Most of it is behind the scenes stuff. The most noticeable change will be how it interacts with the mouse. It should now be a lot smoother and when the user is tearing (right clicking), it wont just tear at points it sees the cursor at, but it’ll tear ALL points between the cursor’s current and previous positions. Meaning it’s now a lot easier to slice the curtain in half with just one swipe.

You might also notice changes in the speed since the majority of the changes are optimization. You’ll only notice it if Curtain was laggy or slow for you before this update. To try out the newly optimized Curtain, check it out here. You can also check out its source here or here. To see a list of updates, jump to the end of the post.

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A lot of the pictures in Algorithmic Art were made using a program I started on a few days ago. I took Curtain and made it 3D. The fabric gets created in the center of the screen, with different parts of it being accelerated in all directions. It’s rendered onto the screen semi-transparently over and over and eventually you get a very organic nebula-like piece of art.

I feel like a lot of what makes the pictures amazing is watching the nebula itself grow. I cleaned it up, and released the applet online which you can try by clicking here. I’ve also uploaded the source on OpenProcessing and Hawkee

Don’t forget I have a Twitter, also a Google Plus profile.

I cleaned up the code, added some comments, and released the source to Circus Fluid. It looks a bit different than the older version: the shadows are deeper, and the colors are smoother. Please leave feedback/criticism wherever you like.

The source can be viewed either on OpenProcessing or Hawkee. If there’s anywhere else I should start releasing sources and applets, let me know!

Short post here. As promised, here’s the source to the ragdoll applet I released a few weeks back: http://www.openprocessing.org/visuals/?visualID=22598

Press ‘r’ to reset. Click and drag to interact.

In this applet, we make use of the Verlet Integration method from Curtain, and create little ragdolls.

I did my best to comment the code for others to use.

Click here to view Curtain (the fabric simulator)

Click here to view Part 2.

A cloth simulator is one of those things I’ve always wanted to make. I’ve given it a few attempts in the past, but hadn’t made much progress. Here I managed to make something that works (and pretty darn well, too) after doing about a week’s worth of research. If you’re a programmer or just plain interested, check out the details of the simulator after the jump.

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