Rocks, Marbles, Stones, ...

Still working on Hierarchy, and the outputs a getting better and better. Our next step is to create a mini-GUI, nothing fancy, but with enough functionality, to do some points placement by hand to see if we can reproduce some interesting patterns.

In the mean time, the other part of our research is about algorithms to place these points (and other related information) to create automatically some interesting textures. We are now looking to do some rocky textures, like marble. Mostly the marble tiles. We are particularly interested in the veins that you can observe on those tile that create such complex textures.

And we have a big challenge with those veins because our tool is mostly about cellular textures and veins are rarely in the form of cells. Our approach is to actually play with veins that are completely traverse the texture, this way, we can create cells and division on the plane.

But still, we managed to produce some interesting outputs:

Let me know what you think about those images!

Twitter account

Here's my twitter account: @widgg.

I usually tweet about funny stuffs like jokes and just thoughts that I have and want to share. Not necessary related to my research. But naturally, when there's a new post on this blog, I share the link.

It's actually the best way to contact me if you have any question or suggestion... or just want to talk about geek, research or any funny stuff.

Caustics

Here's another result. Here, we are trying to create some caustics, those reflection that you can see at the bottom of a pool caused by the sunlight and the surface of the water. We already have very nice outputs that can be achieved simply by distributing points and orientations. We used a poisson-disk sampling for the points.

Here's some of the outputs:

Like this, it doesn't seam very useful or look like caustics. But these kind of images can be used to add information on a surface. One trick is to use an image like this and a texture, for example the bottom of the pool, and when it's time to draw them, for each pixel, you compare the color on the caustic image and on the texture and you take the highest value for the red, green and blue. This way, you can alter a simple texture with and image like this.

Plus, the method that we use can be converted into an animation very easily. All you need to do is to move around the points and their orientations a little bit at each frame. This way, you have a fluid animation that will never loop on itself.

Actually, there's already something that you can use to see a caustic effect. My live-wallpaper, Weird Voronoi Pro, that I presented here a few months ago can produce an animation like this that won't loop. My favorite configuration (that I show here) creates a simple caustics with a little variation of intensity.

My clouds are so fluffy, you're gonna die!

Today I'm showing some cloud textures that I managed to create with a simple algorithm using a Poisson-disk sampling process to distribute some points. What is nice with this process to distribute point is that it's very portable and efficient. It can even be done in parallel on the GPU (with CUDA or OpenCL), this paper actually shows one way to do it: Efficient Maximal Poisson-disk Sampling.

The rendering process for now is done completely on the CPU because we are still in a phase where we need to be able to add, change or remove some part quite fast to adjust the renderer to our needs. It's a bit harder to do that on the GPU. But when we will be completely sure of the product that we want, we will adapt it to the GPU, probably with OpenCL for portability reasons.

So here some of these outputs:

There's still a little bit of work to do to remove some isolated points that we can see in some images. I might have some idea to solve this, just need to implement it. So, let me know what you think about those images.