W:Blut » flock

Minimalismus III: Glow Flock

Frederik Vanhoutte — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 01:00:40 +0000

A re-work of the minimal sketch flock in a box, a mini tribute to Robert Hodgin, an artist so great he makes you want to throw your own code away, only to pick it up again and work it harder : glow flock.

Delaunay triangulation of a flock

Frederik Vanhoutte — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 21:08:50 +0000

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.

Minimalismus I

Frederik Vanhoutte — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 20:20:51 +0000

Two minimal sketches harkening back to the olden days. Introducing: flock in a box and flock on a plane. Astute observers will notice that the 1D version, flock on a stick, is missing. The 0D version, flock on a dot, was used to end this sentence. There’s no real interaction. Click the mouse to shake things up.

Nothing revolutionary here, yet another implementation of Reynolds’ boids. There’s a lot to discover in flocking behavior. Daniel Shiffman’s exposé in the teaching section of his site proved especially illuminating.

If you’ve got a couple of minutes free to code, have a go at it. Flocking soothes the soul…