Flow Field with inspiration from Processing.
(Click on the field for new perlin noise generated flow field)
Working on a project that is calling for some interesting ways to show information. Colleague of mine and Computational Designer/Developer at Spinifex, René Christen, introduced me to flow fields. A really nice example he showed was one of Processing guru Daniel Shiffman had online.
I’ve played around with Shiffman’s examples before, recreating them in Processing and sometimes porting them to Flash – so gave it another go with this flow field example.
After porting/tweaking/banging-head (and using the CASA Lib library for a nice NumberUtil) I’ve come up with the example you see above. The field is generated with perlin noise and there are 1000 boids (the black dots) flowing over the screen with relative ease. Obviously not as quick as Processing but I’m happy with the result.
Thanks also have to go to Joel Gillman and schickm.
Grab the source code and have a play! Be sure to let me know of anything you make!
JK