Our assignment this week was to explore oscillating patterns, but I was kind of struggling with vectors still, so I decided to go back and revisit the first two weeks of material more thoroughly. This sketch is based off of Dan Shiffman’s “Mutual Attraction” sketch (link here).
I realized that I was having a hard time with how vectors operate. After carefully revisiting the core principles of how they behave, however, I now feel more comfortable to move on to more complex systems interactions. In this sketch, I mapped the fill of the circles to hue values based on their X-coordinates. I also tweaked the attraction force and the number of iterations from the original mutual attraction sketch. I also confined their movement to roughly 20% outside the canvas.
In this sketch (link here) I combined the concept of fluid forces with the mutual attraction sketch. As you can see, the result is pretty bizarre. I had a hard time containing the “movers.” I was trying to figure out how to get the movers to disperse more in water while still keeping the fluid dynamics in place. Because their force is limited in water, it is harder for them to get far enough away from each other to generate more force, which is why they initially end up in a blob when you first run the sketch. It’s pretty fun to watch at any rate.