I’ve been busy the last couple of days playing around with something called “Diffusion Limited Aggregation”.
Basically you start with a base shape, let loose one particle at a time, have it undergo brownian motion and when it hits the shape you stop it and add another, randomly walking, particle. Repeat a couple of million times and some cool shapes start forming.
I’ve written my own little simulation software for this and I export the resulting point clouds to blender for lighting and camera set up. I then render them using 3Delight.
So far I don’t have anything more than a couple of tests to show but I’m looking for feedback on visual style, and if anyone has done something simillar I’d love to get some advice about how to produce interesting shapes.
There’s a more detailed technical explanation and a couple of more pictures on my blog if you’re interested.
That is really awesome. Is there anyway to control what shapes it grows? If there is, I can see some crystal growth simulations coming out in the near future. Anyway, very nice. That is really cool.
That’s pretty cool. I used DLA once before as an example in a Rhino scripting course I was teaching, although I’ve never managed to actually use it for anything ‘real’, so I’m really interested to see where you go with this.
I have some plans regarding trying to direct the shapes it creates. I’m going to try using a signed distance field as a force influencing the motion of the particles. That way I hopefully should be able to control where they clump up, but I guess I’ll have to try it before I can say for sure
Anyone have any other ideas of how it could be done?
A fiery color scheme would probably look great, thanks for that idea.
I’m also planning on using some different shapes for the particles instead of just spheres. I think crystals could be really nice.
Took a look at the site you linked to Paul J, some really inspiring stuff there, thanks!
