Thoughts from a Recreational Physicist
This is a companion to the last image, the Dirac Delta Function is moved over to the right and some of the intensity parameters have been punched up a little. These are really starting to resemble the transition energies from atomic orbitals. I’m still on track to add another level of complexity before I start messing with the colors, even though I’m going way far away from my initial goal of trying to replicate a thick paint stroke.
I wasn’t aiming for something this sparse, or this kind of vertical pattern, but it turned out like a more refined version of some of my other experiments. This method is interpolating a function that resembles a Dirac delta function centered at 1/2, the other lines are reflections of that central spike.
I’m working on a technique to create heavy textured straight brush strokes. There are a number of abstract paintings using textures I’d like to reproduce. I’m definitely a way off, but I’m liking some of the results so far.
What separates these from the fractals I’ve generated in the past is that they have a one dimensional linear component, and a single valued transverse component. Previously the fractals have all been 2 dimensional with more complicated structures, which would be multi-valued.
A big advantage of this is that I only have to compute one value per point and don’t have to use any alpha values. Here are some of the initial experiments.
The goal was to produce a rough edge as the “brush” lifted off, but I’m liking a bit of the texture on the most intense part of the “stroke”
The stills don’t have anywhere near the punch that the ring rendering does, but the nebulous billowy cloud like effect is nice. I’m using the same code to pick the colors, just replacing stroke with fill. I’ll have to keep this in my back pocket and see if there is something I can pull this out for in the future.
I can’t say I’m a huge fan of these, but I’m playing around with colors and the rendering.  Right now they just seem pretty  for pretty’s sake.  I think I’m waiting around for inspiration on how to put these to good use.  These are generative and then just selected to save as an image.  Enjoy!
I’ve got to take a break from the stripey stuff for a little while. This is circling back to the circles. I’ve taken the mapping I’ve been using from the inside of a sphere to the set of all circles, lines and points on the plane and combined them. This is what I was aiming for from the outset of this experiment, I’ve just taken a few detours getting here. I’m still trying to figure out if I can use these images or the best techniques to render the objects, or even which sets of transformations even work well for these images.
The core of the approach is tying back the relationships between fractals and parameter spaces. Given the mapping from a subset of 3 dimensional space to simple geometric objects on the plane, we can use that to map distributions of points on that subset to distributions on the simple geometric objects of the plane. I’m trying to figure out if I can make anything pretty with that, and can I exploit it to make anything meaningful out of those images. So here is a random walk through these spaces.
It’s a little late for Halloween, but spooky nonetheless.
I was going back through some of my old posts and making sure the javascript still works, and I loaded up the three.js particle system test code I put up a while back. Instead of being broken, it was even faster in chrome than when i wrote it. I was surprised at how much of a difference the boost in performance made.
I’m trying to put together some instructions and add some context for the tool I’ve been using to create the fractal images on the site. I’ve made some updates to the usability and features, adding the ability to upload an image to imgur. This is only the second rev, and the first of more tools to come.
This is just a quick collection of instructions on how to use the HTML5 fractal drawing application I have on this site. First thing first, the tool draws images based on the colored control points on the screen. You can drag them around with your mouse to create different shapes.
For even more control, each control point has a set of sliders that control how it adds to the image. The first slider controls the amount of rotation you get around the control point. The second controls how much the control point shrinks the image while it copies. The third which is the most complicated, controls how much the image is squished into a line.
The best way to get a feel for how the images change is to dig right in and start manipulating the graphics. Please let me know what you think on the comments to this post. Things are pretty bare right now, but I have plans to add other renderers that I’ve demoed with pictures, and color for sure. I’ve kept it to black and white as I’m trying to build my skills with more complicated images.
Tomorrow morning I’m doing a tough mudder. It’s going to be fun and hard, and I’m planning to have a great time.
I just thought I’d put up an image in somewhat nervous anticipation of the race. Good luck to all the mudders!