Project 4 Final Progress

 The flocking simulation is now running and displaying the trails for each particle. Initially I was drawing each trail every frame because my sketch was 3D and allowed for camera movement. However, that significantly slowed down the animation. I realized that I could significantly speed up the drawing by locking the camera and only drawing the changes every draw, instead of redrawing the whole frame.

Below is an example of the flocking behavior with the trails drawn as described above.

I'm still trying to decide where I want to go with this project. Right now the flock is just following a particle moving along a 3D sinusoidal curve. I know I want the flock to be influenced by something else, like an image, and have that source be revealed by the behavior of the flock.

Project 4 Final

Idea
Create generative art piece utilizing the swarm behavior of a flocking system as part of the aesthetic.

Goals
Have the boids "paint" an image by leaving behind a colored trail or some other type of trail technique, such as a polygon trail or bezier curve.
Develop some way to control the boids in an interesting way, such as based off an image map, or just through user interaction.

Technical
Will be coded in Processing, and built on top of the flocking system I've already created. Or I may migrate my code to webGL so it is easier to be presented anywhere.

Presentation
My project would be either projected in real time, or shown on the big HVS screen.



Inspiration:

Golan Levin
Floccugraphs





Robert Hodgin
Magnetic Structures


Daniel Shiffman
Swarm
 

Project 3 Chaos and Complexity: Progress

After presenting my last work in progress it was clear that merely looking "chaotic" was not enough and I needed to embed a true chaotic system into my simulator.

I found the interactivity of my piece very rewarding and did not want to give that up. However, when it was not in use, my piece was quite uninteresting and would not entice viewers to actually interact with it. So I decided to embed a chaotic system to drive the cursor position when there are no users interacting, and as soon as someone starts interacting with the mouse, it uses their input to drive the simulation.

For the chaotic system, I chose to implement a double pendulum especially since it has similar forms to what my piece was already generating and I thought the movement would go well together. I use the end of the double pendulum to drive the particles and I only display the endpoint of the pendulum, so it is not very visible that my simulation is using a double pendulum. And I have not yet decided if that is desirable, or if I want to make the double pendulum more apparent.

Also, in order for my pendulum to be stable, I needed to implement 4th order Runge-Kutta instead of just simple Euler integration.

You can see the trail of the double pendulum as the circle in the image below.