Delaunay triangulation of a flock

A vari­a­tion on flock on a plane using a rather small flock of 500 par­ti­cles. Each frame the Delau­nay tri­an­gu­la­tion is cal­cu­lated. The ver­tices are col­ored accord­ing to their move­ment direc­tion. This gives a nice 3D illusion.

It was impor­tant to get the tri­an­gu­la­tion as effi­cient as pos­si­ble to main­tain a decent frame rate. Writ­ing my own code was no option this time. So I used John Lloyd’s QuickHull3D pack­age. It’s clean effi­cient code to cal­cu­late the con­vex hull of a col­lec­tion of points. Addi­tion­aly it meshes nicely with Pro­cess­ing. The tech­nique to use a 3D con­vex hull to con­struct the 2D Delau­nay tri­an­gu­la­tion is well described: lift the 2D points onto a 3D parab­o­loid sur­face, cal­cu­late the con­vex hull of this sur­face and project the faces back down on the plane.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 19th, 2009 at 22:08. It is filed under Blog, Portfolio, Processing and tagged with construct, delaunay, flock, particles, Processing, steering, voronoi. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.