smoke textures

Back on creating textures. First, I finished the first version of that new renderer. Might still have some bug, but in general, it's done.

One of the objectives that we had with this new tool that we created was to create some smoke. A bit similar to this one:

The picture above is called Smoke Art, so creating images using smoke. This one is not generated by any computer. Other Smoke Art are listed there: http://www.bablotech.com/2008/12/14/20-amazing-smoke-art-pictures/, and some of them are really amazing.

With our new method, we try to reproduce such piece of art, but completely random. We don't try to recreate a scene or anything. Just create random smoke effects.

There's many ways to do such images, the most popular is probably with particles. You use thousands or millions of points and let them behave like smoke. But this approach is heavy to run and it's mostly for animation. For static images like ours, it's not very interesting to manage that amount of points to finally find the right image.

Our method still consists of placing points and some information of associated with points on the plane to partition it. We are still using the layers to create the effects and it works really well with smoke. So here's some of my favorite that I created today:

We still have some work to do to really control that new technique. And also some experimentation to be sure that the behavior is more stable. One thing that we might try is adding a bit of color to it instead of working in gray. But not drastic colors like red or green. Little variation from gray, but enough to see that there's more.

Please leave any comment or question that you have about these textures.

More textures

In my research, I'm still working on my textures. Here's some results I produced today that I really like.

Those effects might be implemented in a next version of my live-wallpaper. I haven't decided yet. For the first two images, I put the orientation of the points right on the plane. Plus I tried a new function to compute the distance. This one allows some distance pixels to actually have a distance of zero when it's perfectly aligned with another points.

Next, I will try to use images as a source of points and orientations. To see if with this method it's possible to create mosaic from an image. Creating mosaic with the normal Voronoi diagram is something well known in the literature. But with this method of oriented points that creates cells that are not convex polygons might allow us to do something very unique.

Let me know what you think of these images.