I’ve been playing around a lot with gravity and repulsion for force based layouts recently. I guess it’s no surprise that I eventually had to turn it in to another sound visualization. Here’s the result:

Open Visualization as Layer - Open Visualization in a New Window

(Click the fullscreen icon in the options menu for optimal performance.)

There are three emitters, one for each frequency range: lows, mids and highs. Every emitter either has an attractive or repulsive force which depends on the volume of the emitter’s frequency range. If for example the base is strong, that emitter will act as a repulsive field and force all particles away. If at the same time another frequency range is weak it will attract all particles surrounding it, basically sucking them up.

In addition to a force, each emitter has its own color which influences all particles surrounding it. The closer a particle gets to an emitter the more it will take its color. To keep the particles from being randomly scattered around the stage there is an invisible fourth emitter which acts as a counter-weight to all the other emitters. If the sum of all emitters’ repulsive forces is high, the fourth emitter will attract particles so that they aren’t just blown off the stage.

It’s nice when you’re able to apply the stuff you experiment with during freetime in real live projects. Just that was the case with the Coke X-Mas banners I made for argonautenG2. I combined my spline and particle engines to be rendered through a shared interface which produced these light-trails:

…with some more partying particles, fresh out of the oven:

Inspired by vektorfarm’s marvelous In An Absolut World Clip, some of my Permutation Particles joined the fun and started a little particle party of their own. Put on your dancing shoes and swing your hips after clicking the screens below.

Fanta.de has just been relaunched and my particle engine found its way into the homepage animation as an interactive alternative to prerendered video. Here is the dummy I created:

The final animation can be seen at www.fanta.de

(for argonauten G2)

Some blurring combined with a few thousand particles makes up the following little plasma animation. Different particle types and settings generate some quite interesting result, so give it a shot and create your own little plasma cloud.

I just added yet another particle behaviour with the permutation algorithm. This makes it more flexible and enables decoupled usage of its position data, like drawing directly into a bitmap, which drastically boosts the performance.

I’ve just been experimenting a little more with my particle engine, adding spring and vector based behaviour. As expected, drawing each particle via BitmapData extremely boosts the performance: I got up to 30.000 standard eased particles on my 2Ghz Core2Duo. No ground breaking news but still worth a small post I guess.

Vector particles with rotation

Vector particles using Bitmap

Eased particles using Bitmap

Spring particles using Bitmap

I recently implemented a slightly modified version of my AS2 permutation engine for the header of Jan Pautsch’s (Creative Director Art Interactive at argonauten G2) online portfolio:

http://www.thismortalmagic.com

I must say - I’m really starting to like AS3! To get a little more practice I also ported my permutation engine to AS3 and got very fluid animations for 5000+ particles. Herer is a smaller, browser-friendly version with ‘only’ 2500 particles:

To get into AS3 I ported my particle engine to latter and the result is quite nice. Now 1000 fully animated (position, rotation, alpha, scale) particles are possible at the same time. When only changing the positions of the particles and therefore being able to use bitmap caching, up to 4000 particles still deliver a decent performance on my machine.