Last night's harvest

Super weird. The little caterpillars(???) are unusually stable/cohesive, but they don't just collapse into a single boring puddle or mound.

Kind of an odd one. At first it makes this honeycomb texture, but then rapidly splits into a bunch of self-propelled globs

More fruits from running the batch-renderer overnight

Pagoda Jet

Bead Cucumber Cacti

Crazy Dumpling

Too many cool mutations to record them all at full quality 😭

Part of the refactor involved unifying my path-tracer with a faster raytracer that uses fake AO instead of multiple bounces. Finally have this running at 60fps under the same roof as my full path tracer. Should make it easier to upgrade the materials to GGX later down the line, too.

Jellyfish-Mushroom-Raincloud

I'm finally working on cleaning up 3d fluoddity. I may fully branch it off from the 2d version into its own repo. Or I may try to give it a modular 'fluoddity backend' where it supports 2d or 3d. Unfortunately, the data structures are all different and the physics kernels have diverged quite a bit..

Volatile

Multi-layered Pop

Mushroom cap bubbles

Growing trumpets

Spools to Cables

Crooked tower melts into eels

Realtime pathtracing some random mutations of one of the rain-cloud like configs

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the fully oriented particles show more modes of alignment. In particular, I don't feel like I was seeing any flat sheets in the old method.

Blast

Glittering Spools

Trying out a version where each particle carries around a full orientation frame, rather than deriving it from cross(velocity vector, environment vector). Seems to promote a lot of tight spinning. My instinct is to prevent this kind of chiral bias with a symmetry but I kind of like the effect...

Lilypad clouds try to wander off. I find this one really pleasing, especially that first cloud that starts as a donut

I love this rain + clouds motif. Often times, dense enough groups of particles can 'swim against the current' of some gravity-like force. Usually, dense clouds aren't perfectly stable, and particles will slowly peel off. Those stray particles fall back down and start the process over again.

Indecisive bubbles

Spread

Bought the wrong kind of yeast

I wish I had a cooler answer than "I reroll till shit gets WEIRD then I click on the weird stuff" but it is what it is. There's a lot of trial and error as I slowly build up an intuitive feel for 'this will be a dead end of familiarity' vs. 'that will be a genuinely novel lineage to explore'

I set up a grip of renders to run while I slept last night. These are all close relatives of Cortex. First: a medley with a few different mutations mixed together

Shredded

Hyphae

Tiered clouds shrink as they rain into the level below

Pink threads rain down and collect into drops. When a droplet gets big enough, it forms a gumdrop shape and lifts off.

State of my quixotic sonification attempts: I now have a supercollider server that I can drive from Fluoddity physics and listen to in realtime. Currently it's just a bank of oscillators so that each particle can contribute sound at a chosen frequency+amplitude.

Fuzzyrain

Melting pot of color coded mutations

Exploring some gross looking mutations. Warning: Icky! About halfway through I turn off some glowing particles

Waterfall waves

The RTX 5060 is a breathtakingly powerful computer. I can't get over it! The first GPU I bought was this hideous monstrosity: a 9800gx2 for which I paid nearly $800 in todays money (it was 2008ish). The 5060 cost about half that much for 25x the power without even considering RT or tensor cores...

Calvin's Dinner

Invisible bowl with adventurous spaghetti

Frustrated Pac-Men

Testing sdf collisions by restricting everything to an invisible sphere... Maybe I do an hourglass next? I should really set up non-cube trail canvas resolutions so that I can confine things to a thin petri dsh or narrow tube without wasting tons of voxels. But Claude sucks at aspect ratio stuff 🫤

Having fun with shiny particles. I find this texture very satisfying, reminds me of velvet.

Some highlights for ~6 minutes browsing mutations of the Ouroboros Tentacle

Locking the fuck in on this living metal sprinkles look. The less-directional lighting situation has really improved convergence for realtime mode. This is only 2spp+denoiser! I'm blown away! I could just sit here all day pressing next mutation.

I know I'm saying this a lot, but I cannot believe this look is possible in realtime! I really feel like I could reach out and touch this one (with gloves maybe) First time I've ever been tempted to get a VR setup, but if you give a mouse a cookie, he'd probably need a 5090 to go with it.

Feature I've been meaning to add because it's so simple: hide all particles on the inside of an arbitrary sdf function. Could be used for cross sections, carving out a space around the camera, things like that. See also: collisions with sdf geometry. Really easy to do since distance+normal are known

What if soap bubbles had trouble letting go?

Reminds me of mushroom caps