Michael Hogg - Software


	Overview

	GCE

	Marble Challenge

	ASCIIroids

	PSD (Second Life)

	Gravity Bubbles

	FractalNet

	EcoSim

	Cosmic Dust

	LandMesh

	Imagencrypter

	Foxy Detector

	MacDiff

	Asteroid Belt

	Matrix Attack

	Solar Swarm

	OS X Terminal

	Tools

	Names :-)

Cosmic Dust

Cosmic Dust is a simple particle animation system, consisting of about 1,500 lines of Java, which I wrote from scratch. It generates QuickTime movies, using QuickTime for Java (QTJ). With 2GB of RAM installed, over 100 million particles can be animated, producing very smooth smoke-like effects.

Details

There are two main types of component which are used to design an animation – dust sources and forcefields. A dust source is like a nozzle which sprays out dust particles in a particular pattern, and a forcefield affects the motion of dust particles by applying a continuous force. Any quantity and combination of dust sources and forcefields can be defined.

Each dust source has the following basic properties, which are permanent:

Min and max speed limits for emitted particles
Rate of particle emission
Width of spray (angle)

The speed and direction of the emitted particles follow a normal distribution, to give a more natural appearance than a simple uniform distribution. Other additional properties can be specified to create different types of dust source. So far, I have implemented the following types:

Type	Location	Spray direction	Colour
Simple	Fixed	Fixed	Fixed
Oscillating	Fixed	Oscillating with specified amplitude and period	Fixed
Rotating	Fixed	Rotating at specified rate	Fixed
Rotating gradient	Fixed	Rotating at specified rate	Follows a gradient across the width of the spray
Wandering	Oscillates independently in X and Y directions	Rotating at specified rate	Fixed

So far, I have implemented the following types of forcefield:

Type	Direction	Force
Uniform parallel	Identical for all particles	Uniform (identical for all particles)
Uniform radial	Centred on a specified source point	Uniform (identical for all particles)
Gravity radial	Centred on a specified source point	Inverse square of distance to source point

Fast preview mode

Cosmic Dust features a “fast preview” mode, which quickly renders a low-quality version of the final video. This is useful for getting a rough idea of what the final video will look like, without waiting a long time for the high-quality version to render. By default, the “fast preview” mode uses 100 times fewer particles than the final video (eg. 10,000 particles instead of 1 million), and therefore renders 100 times faster.

The images below illustrate the difference in quality between “fast preview” mode (left) and the final video (right):

Cosmic Dust - illustration of fast preview

Cosmic Dust - illustration of fast preview

Videos

This is my favourite demo video that I’ve created so far. It shows two “wandering” dust sources, and two “gravity radial” forcefields, using 10 million particles.

Watch this video on Vimeo →

If these videos don’t play smoothly on your computer, try clicking on the “HD is on” button within the video, to switch to low-quality mode.

Here are a couple more videos:


Spinners (one gravity source)		Spinners (two gravity sources)
20 million particles		20 million particles

And here are some test videos:


Orbiters (fast preview)	20 million particles test	Five source test	Three source test
0.1 million particles	20 million particles	3 million particles	4.5 million particles


First oscillating test	Rainbow test	First test
1 million particles	0.8 million particles	0.9 million particles

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Contact me – Page last updated on 9th August 2008 – Website hosted by 5quidhost (highly recommended!)