My newest project, Zephyr, is coming to FxHash on Thursday, August 4th! Here’s an overview of the algorithm and features.
Project page: https://www.fxhash.xyz/generative/17290
The name Zephyr traces back to Zephyrus, the Greek god of the west wind, and refers to any light breeze. The flowing particles in the program are getting pushed around by a zephyr, creating interesting and organic patterns.
How is it made?
Zephyr is a flow-field program. A flow-field is a grid of vectors that direct particles along the screen. In order to create an organic-looking vector field, Perlin noise (essentially smooth random numbers) can be used to pick the angles of the vectors. Flow-fields are commonly used in generative art, with the most popular project being Fidenza by Tyler Hobbs.
I randomly place a bunch of different particles on the screen to follow this flow-field in order to create the outputs. I can adjust the speed that the particles flow through the screen, as well as the shapes and characteristics of the particles themselves.
Features
There are 3 different types of flow-fields possible, though they vary quite a bit within each type.
Whirlwind
Gust
Breezy
Particles
Particles can be lines, all different kinds of polygons, circles, and “leaves”, which makes a bunch of different distributions possible. This is where I did most of the work on the program, constantly changing sizes, speed, shape, and distributions of the particles to find the best parameters. I needed to make sure that every variation of particles looked good. For most of the outputs, the main particles are circles, triangles, trapezoids, or hexagons, with circles being the most common. For these main particles, there are 3 possible size distributions: large, medium, and small.
Large
Medium
Small
There are also 2 addition types of circle particles that are possible besides normal circles.
Shadowed
Umbra
In addition, these particles can grow smaller at different rates.
Fast
Slow
More Features
There are 3 different distributions of the different types of particles, leading some outputs to have different amounts of the main particles compared to other secondary particles. Each piece can either have 2000, 2500, or 3000 particles total.
Colors
A lot of time and effort went into finding the right color palettes. Some I had from previous projects, but many I created just for Zephyr. There are 16 different color palettes in total (not all of them are in the picture). Some color palettes have an off-white background instead of gray.
And that’s pretty much it. Hope you enjoyed learning more about Zephyr and definitely check out the project page! https://www.fxhash.xyz/generative/17290