W:Blut » buoyancy http://www.wblut.com Experiments in generative graphics Tue, 13 Dec 2011 18:12:26 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 W:Blut http://0.gravatar.com/avatar/f53eecb68a71cc8113e72e1e53c94f7d.png?s=48 http://www.wblut.com buoyancy http://www.wblut.com/2008/03/06/buoyancy/ http://www.wblut.com/2008/03/06/buoyancy/#comments Thu, 06 Mar 2008 21:56:26 +0000 Frederik Vanhoutte http://www.wblut.com/2008/03/06/buoyancy/ Another piece of code stuck in a drawer. Originally it was meant to be an exercise in collision detection between falling particles. Fake physics, shudder. To make the interactions interesting the particles need to move at different speeds, otherwise they would just get stuck together. But the movement never felt right. Fooling around, I reversed the vertical motion and somehow it works… I’d like to claim it was a conscious decision, but it wasn’t.

It’s amazing how the collisions suggest rotation. Try to follow a small bubble when it hits a larger one, can you see the larger bubble rotating? The interactions involved are deceptively simple, the bubbles move slightly apart when overlapping. Nothing else. Actually, the hardest part was finding a name (and spelling it): buoyancy (click here for a version without OpenGL). Moving the mouse pops the bubbles.

buoyancy
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