Dizoolexa

20,000 particle trails through a simplex curl field

This “look” is probably nothing new to most Generative Art veterans, but I find the patterns to be quite mesmerising. It was also a good way to introduce myself to some of the “standard toolkit” techniques I hadn’t played with yet.

The approach is roughly as follows:

• Generate a bunch of randomly placed particles within a circle centred on the canvas to initialise.
• Give each particle a color by linear interpolation between a start and an end color, using Perlin or Simplex noise at those co-ordinates to decide the interpolation point
• Move each particle per time period using the curl noise at the current point. Curl noise is based on some underlying texture - for that, you can use an octaved Perlin or Simplex noise
• Draw lines of the particles movement using the particle’s color
• Make the odd numbered particles move the opposite way (“backwards” in some sense) - this avoids the edge of the circle being visible at points where the direction is generally travelling into the circle