Noise Spears Processing Sketch


This is my suped-up version of the old flight404 and toxi Processing sketch – it uses Perlin noise to create a moving field of very organic-looking daggers.  toxi used it for hairs, and now I made an intricate version that uses 3D daggers drawn using OpenGL.

Noise Spears - PixelPusher (after toxi and flight404)
Noise Spears – PixelPusher (after toxi and flight404)

Here is a short movie.

In search of inspiration, I stumbled on an old thread on the Processing.org boards where toxi and flight404 were trading sketches that created “vehicles” of noise, angry noise bugs swarming around the screen in very fluid patterns.  Unfortunately, it didn’t work in Processing 0148, so I adapted it a bit, but also missing was the blur routine that toxi originally added to give the noise some depth and body.

Also unfortunately, many things have changed since the original version of Processing this sketch was written for, among them how colors are handled in the pixels[] array.  They used to be an interleaved array of rgb values, and now they are color objects themselves.  So, rather than re-write this CPU-based blur routine, I figured it was time to check into OpenGL-land and see what shaders had to offer.

Looking into the now fully-integrated-into-Processing GLGraphics library I found everything I needed, and, after a few quick tries, settled on drawing the whole scene into an off-screen GLTexture and then applying a chain of shaders to it to get a “bloom”-type effect.  The end result isn’t spectacular, not quite was I was hoping for, but it is an interesting example.  At least, I think so.

You can also make some nice stiff cyber-grass if you add some 3D depth to the blades.

Without further ado, here is the sourcecode.

License:

Creative Commons License
Noise Spears by pixelpusher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License.
Based on a work at http://toxi.co.uk.


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