Playing with particle systems
Wed, 11 August 2010
I wrote a program in Processing for my dad yesterday for his birthday. Watch it below:-
The text effect works by reading in a grayscale image with the intensities at each point (the text is white, surrounding area is black, the blur is a gradient from gray inside to black outside) and creating a ‘Pic’ object for each pixel with an intensity greater than some threshold. The Pic object has a random colour but its brightness is adjusted according to the intensity of the source pixel. The Pic object remembers the position of the source pixel as its ‘target’ and then puts itself at a random location and starts moving slowly towards its target. The instantaneous speed for a given time is proportional to the distance to the target at that time, so a decelerating effect is achieved. The net result is that an unorganized swarm of particles slowly arranges itself into formation creating a ‘reverse explosion’ effect. About why I named it ‘Pic’ – no idea – I needed to come up with something quick because my dad was about to arrive in 45 minutes. :P
I decided to try openFrameworks since I was more familiar with C++ than Java. Here’s something I made in it:-
