Making something seem natural can be a difficult thing. What does it mean for something to be natural. I think that naturally occurring things can also have seemingly unnatural properties. Take crystals for instance. If one had never seen a crystal before in their life and had made it a while in a mechanized society I suspect they would find it hard to believe that the crystal was natural. Another instance is of things on a micro scale. Again the objects would seem unreal and man made.
The first thought that I had in making something natural was to make something like an ant farm with connecting and wandering tunnels. The following is a result of my pursuit of an ant farm.
As you can see it looks nothing like an ant farm. Essentially what is going on in this is a point is initialized then has a probability of duplicating. The point and potentially its duplicate then move a random distance in a random direction. To ensure that the animation always runs smoothly, first, points off the screen are deleted, and second, if there are more than N points then we delete the oldest points till there are only N. N is a configurable number here.
The next script I wrote tried again to realign with the ant farm idea. I definatly was closer but I think I may have gotten it upside down.
We now have some sort of growth maybe like a tree. When you click (hopefully) the animation will start over with a new color. I think you can get some pretty cool colors all things said and done with this.
I also wanted to have something chase the mouse around the screen. I though it might be interesting to have waves following the mouse that varied orthogonal to the vector pointing to the mouse location from the current draw location. My first attempt did not work out as well as I hoped.
As you can see the lines move radially to the mouses location rather than having the variation orthogonal to the vector mouse location. It still is a pretty interesting effect and I rather liked the way you could make the lines compress and grow depending on how you used the mouse.
Finally I actually got the lines to move in the way I originally intended. Here is the result:
This fulfilled my goal though I found it annoying the way that each line was not moving quite the way I wanted it too. I envisioned it such that each varying stream would move at a constant “speed.” However if the mouse is close to the location the lines are being drawn and move around the animation can move very quickly.
I really like all three of these sketches. The second two definitely remind me of light painting, as you mentioned in your presentation in class, especially with the nice gradual hue change that definitely invokes the idea of a glow stick or neon lights at night!
My favorite sketch is the last one. Although I find it a liitle slow moving plus its annoying that the mouse location is thrown off a bit (At least in my browser). But The slow moving, noise filled lines are really cool as they play around in the mouses wake. I am also intrigued by the color scheme idea to play with the saturation so the color coordination is still obtained as things change.