Gel maps are very cool
BlitzMax Forums/BlitzMax Programming/Gel maps are very cool
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| I figured out the mechanics of gel maps. When you apply them to particle animation you get a really cool result, and some very complicated movement. After a few hours of toiling, I've written this:  Yes I know, it looks like nothing special. but you have to see it in motion to know what I'm talking about! You can get the Source and Exe here. |
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| Cool, nice effect! It'd make a cool screensaver! |
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| Very nice ! thanks for the code ! |
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| Pretty nice. Where does the term `gel map` come from, can you explain? |
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| perhaps because it looks like a gelart mass that is glowing :-) (don't know if this is written correct, in german it is just called "gel") |
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| It's a Gel map because the canvas behaves like a kind of gel. That is, it remembers forces that are applied to it and slowly forms back into shape. In this case, I made it remember your mouse strokes, so that's what you're seeing when you rub the canvas. It will make perfect sense if you hit G. Once I get back home, I'd like to make this code deform a picture in the same way. It should look neat! Merry Christmas (etc) to all! |
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| nice and funny effect, really cool ;) |
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| Basically to render this effect, you blit a quad to a texture with multiply blending, with the darkness of the quad being how fast you want the "gel" to return to it's normal "shape", and then you blit the particles on top with add blending. The quad darkens the previous frame, and as a result, the frame before that, and before that, etc which still exist within the image to some degree until eventually those areas that have not been written over again become black. It just occured to me that one could get an interesting effect if one were to adjust the hue of the quad being used to darken the previous passes. Then the background would have psychadelic shifts in hue. If I'm not mistaken, the colors we're seeing here are just a result of the particles themselves being colored, thus the white areas. I think the effect I describe above would work best if the particles moved about rather than simply appearing in one location one frame. Otherwise you wouldn't get color trails with shifting hues. Hm... just looked at the demo... Yhe particles you have are moving... in odd ways! What's going on there? Are the particles being affected by the gravity of nearby particles, or are they following the contours of the gel map, moving to the lowest point? That's something I didn't expect to see! |
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| I've just been playing with it for a few minutes... That's much cooler than I thought it was gonna be from looking at the screenshot. And looking at it I wonder what it might be useful for. It seems more like something alive than like something one might use for a particle effect. It forms currents, which over time change and evolve... And if you group all the particles into a clump, they're unstable and will eventually split into a group of two perhaps, then rejoin, then split into a group of 3, then five, and then finally break up into lots of little groups with single particles wandering around in between. |
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| Yeah, isn't it neat? |
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| [edit] Ah, I see you have included source, I suppose I could have looked at that to figure out how it works, duh! [/edit] |
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