reservocation piece
Firstly, you should go see the piece. It is displayed in the werk section of Reservocation issue 11. You can also find a development sketch of there, which will probably confuse everyone without the following confusing explanation.
Every coloured object in the scene can be thought of as individual spinning pegs - the shape of the pegs is randomly chosen between a cross, a reversed 'r' shape, and a single verticle line. At semi-random points in time, impacts are set off within the scene - these impacts blow air out in a circle over the surrounding pegs, starting them spinning. Once the wind has washed over, 'springs' in the peg push it backwards, and it starts rotating back and forth until friction does its work and lets it rest back at its original position. The entire time, the colour of the pegs changes in direct relation to the velocity and direction of rotation.
While this can seem fairly simple, when displayed in a field of pegs, the similarity of both rotation and colour creates wave patterns that seemingly intersect and react against each other. (But they don't.)
Technical details
There are a lot of arrays and lookup tables used here (to the point where very little math aside from addition and subtraction is being done on the fly.) The image is created by double-buffered pixel map manipulation.
Aside from the first scene the user sees, zoom level, shape and impact location/time are all random.
The whole thing is also motion blurred, to prevent ugliness that results from the limited number of rotations a 10x10 pixel peg can possess.
[back]
Firstly, you should go see the piece. It is displayed in the werk section of Reservocation issue 11. You can also find a development sketch of there, which will probably confuse everyone without the following confusing explanation.
Every coloured object in the scene can be thought of as individual spinning pegs - the shape of the pegs is randomly chosen between a cross, a reversed 'r' shape, and a single verticle line. At semi-random points in time, impacts are set off within the scene - these impacts blow air out in a circle over the surrounding pegs, starting them spinning. Once the wind has washed over, 'springs' in the peg push it backwards, and it starts rotating back and forth until friction does its work and lets it rest back at its original position. The entire time, the colour of the pegs changes in direct relation to the velocity and direction of rotation.
While this can seem fairly simple, when displayed in a field of pegs, the similarity of both rotation and colour creates wave patterns that seemingly intersect and react against each other. (But they don't.)
Technical details
There are a lot of arrays and lookup tables used here (to the point where very little math aside from addition and subtraction is being done on the fly.) The image is created by double-buffered pixel map manipulation.
Aside from the first scene the user sees, zoom level, shape and impact location/time are all random.
The whole thing is also motion blurred, to prevent ugliness that results from the limited number of rotations a 10x10 pixel peg can possess.
[back]
