Math-powered pretty motion

November 2, 2017 11:30 AM

Andrei Kashcha's vector field explorer : Plentiful examples of interesting fields on reddit, compose your own with GLSL, or just click randomize.
posted by a snickering nuthatch (21 comments total)

v.x = p.y;
v.y = 0.5 * p.y * (1.0 - p.x*p.x) - p.x;

Van der Pol oscillator (adapted from the Wikipedia article).

This is pretty amazing and fun to play with.
posted by wanderingmind at 11:50 AM on November 2, 2017 [4 favorites]

Setting the particle color to "angle" and bumping the particle count up to 60000 looks really nice.
posted by straight at 12:03 PM on November 2, 2017

IM FREAKING OUT HERE

this gives me a touch of that lotus seed pod horror thing
posted by thelonius at 12:07 PM on November 2, 2017

wanderingmind's Van der Pol oscillator, linkified

Star
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 12:10 PM on November 2, 2017 [2 favorites]

Colorful undulation
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 12:31 PM on November 2, 2017 [2 favorites]

Wow, that's super neat. I always like it when people make interesting graphical output easier to program.
posted by wierdo at 12:46 PM on November 2, 2017

Jpfed, that "colorful undulation" one is also nice with an extreme (400000) particle count.
posted by straight at 12:58 PM on November 2, 2017

Waterfalls
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 2:20 PM on November 2, 2017

If you do get this far do click on the link and poke around, it's real math but just quite beautiful also and well behaved so unlikely to crash browsers or anything.
posted by sammyo at 5:57 PM on November 2, 2017

Shifting banded spiral
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 10:12 PM on November 2, 2017

Well, I just went and did too much homework trying to figure out how to plot controlled Bezier curves in this thing just to try to spell MeFi or MF or something and now my head *really* hurts.
posted by loquacious at 11:15 PM on November 2, 2017

Wow ... I love playing around with cos and sin, you get so many magical flows:
A couple of my faves:
Colorful rolling hay piles in the field
A virtual drone filming while pacing tumbling red marshmallows

OMG, you can pan and zoom!! .... I've found my mental porn, I'll be in my bunk for the next week.
posted by forforf at 11:41 AM on November 3, 2017 [1 favorite]

Flying among pillars
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 12:21 PM on November 3, 2017 [1 favorite]

Panning and zooming!

These are great, please keep posting cool ones as much as you want, Jpfed.
posted by straight at 5:19 PM on November 3, 2017

vec2 v = vec2(0., 0.);

I've never seen "0.", with nothing after the decimal point, before...is that a convention in math that I am ignoratnt of? Or is it syntax in a programming language?
posted by thelonius at 5:05 AM on November 6, 2017

Some languages use a period after a number to say "don't store this as an integer; store it as a number that can have a non-integer part (most commonly a floating-point number)".
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 5:13 AM on November 6, 2017 [1 favorite]

Flying over the grid
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 5:38 AM on November 6, 2017

Coalescing Julia Set
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 6:07 AM on November 6, 2017

It now supports mouse position and clicks...
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 8:29 AM on November 9, 2017

And there's a nascent subreddit for it.
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 9:23 AM on November 9, 2017

Julia Set with mouse control!
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 10:21 AM on November 29, 2017