Tukey Window

This is a quick video demonstrating Tukey Windowing modulating the particle size using age as the input signal. Alpha (from the window function, not rgba) is set to .3 and it's been zoomed in to see the effect easier. Windowing the particle size will help ease transitions from particle birth and death so there's less noticeable pops. Here's some glsl code:

float tukeyWindow(float sig, float alpha) {
 if (alpha == 0.) // rectangular window
  return 1.;
 else if (sig < alpha / 2.)
  return 0.5 * (1. + cos(2.*3.1459265/alpha * (sig-alpha/2.)));
 else if (sig > 1.-alpha/2.)
  return 0.5 * (1. + cos(2.*3.1459265/alpha * (sig-1.+alpha/2.)));
 else
  return 1.;
}

Control

I've started integrating my Arturia Minilab to control various simulation parameters, inputs, and visualization options. Here is a quick video demonstrating the UI I've made that captures the midi signals for all of the knobs, pads, and sliders. Pads 1-4 select a different bank of knob settings, each with their own presets and color indicator. Values can be changed by both the controller and the on-screen UI. The keys work as well, but I'm focusing on these first as they will be the primary way of sculpting the behavior of the system. The keys will likely act as gates and triggers for adding new input (i.e. sound or image data).

Particle trails

Messing around with feedback to get flow lines from the fluid sim. The color represents velocity direction and value is the magnitude of the velocity. Particles can bounce around obstacles and don't spawn inside them. 1 million particles @60 fps.

GPU particles

Here's 250,000 particles being advected by the velocity field. This is being done using glsl shaders in TouchDesigner. The value of the particles is currently just the magnitude of the velocity, but I'll be adding a lot more color options later. I'm maintaining 60fps using a 512x512 fluid container.

I'm going to spend the next couple of weeks making big pushes in UI to prepare for a public demonstration at the end of year show. A lot to do still.

Audio visualization, obstacle velocity

Here's a quick update that includes a couple new features: passing velocity in with obstacle data and rendering 3d geometry to a 2d image to use as input (although in this video, actual obstacles and density fields aren't present). I've got a simple particle simulation running on the CPU in TouchDesigner whose initial velocity and direction is being controlled by an audio waveform. I followed along with Derivative's 2016 Norway Workshop to get the system set up. Particle velocities are rendered as colors and piped into the CUDA sim. Adding these features went fairly smoothly.

Here it's very apparent that the simulation container doesn't have any interesting border conditions, which can be a good and bad thing. It's another feature to add. In the coming months, I'll be working on the UI, different composition techniques, experimenting with looks, and improving stability to prepare for MAT's End of Year Show. I've also become very interested in Ted's Wavelet Turbulence paper which would really send the visuals through the roof. No timeline on that yet, but it's going on the list.

Boundaries and color

This update includes a lot of changes to the simulation algorithm as well as some new features. I ended up restructuring the velocity solve to mirror the one found in GPU Gems, which is still based on Stam's solution, but is more clear about the pressure and temperature fields, and simplifies the gradient subtraction a bit, so the performance is better.

For the reaction coupling, I diffuse two density fields with a laplacian kernel and apply the Gray-Scott equation, then advect them. Since there is a slight amount of diffusion from bilinear interpolation in the advection step, I suspect the Gray-Scott feed and kill values might be a little off. Nonetheless it appears stable. I'm passing a texture from Touch into cuda to define obstacles. The color is coming from the velocity, with hue mapped to its polar angle.

There are a lot of fields and variables to play with now. I'll have to decide if I want to start working on robustness and composition techniques, or to move forward with adding a particle system and pushing the resolution as far as possible.

Tiling

I returned to some of my previous work on aperiodic tiles from two years ago. This time, I'm overlaying different iterations of the same prototile and rendering them as polygonal tubes with Mantra. Everything is done in Houdini with a little color correction in Photoshop. I'm trying to decide which ones to submit to Bridges this year.