On this day a year ago, I tried to launch #Marblemania, a realtime generative art piece/animation, which I'd been working on for several months and which was intended to be used as fundraiser for my open source work... Alas, it was a complete and utter disaster with near zero interest 😭

Still, I've got a real soft spot for this piece, for its zen like character, the movements, the huge variance of resulting visuals... Over the past year I've been watching hundreds of versions regulary in the evenings to calm my mind before going to sleep... 🤩

(I despise marketing and likely that was a big reason for the "failure to launch". A part of me feels I should just try again at some point...)

Short announcement video:
https://mastodon.thi.ng/@toxi/110667570347783712

Animated GIF of 200 screenshots:
https://mastodon.thi.ng/@toxi/110688682293173253

More WIP project updates (from last year):
https://mastodon.thi.ng/@toxi/tagged/MarbleMania

#GenerativeArt #Art #Marbling #Simulation #ThingUmbrella #OpenSource #Fundraiser

An overview of all 70 #Marblemania base color themes (plus 4 random variations for each). In the piece, each individual shape (for each of its lifecycles) picks a similar random variation (currently ±12%) of these base colors, leading to more subtle color shifts/variations, even without any other shading extras...

In the overview map, themes are sorted by mean luminance (vertical axis) and the colors themselves in each theme are sorted by L→H→C. #TypeScript generator code included and full source available here:

https://gist.github.com/postspectacular/a822677ec4d1286cb6ef947ca12818c0

Last night I cleared out the 10k+ screenshots & recordings (~24GB) taken during the past few months of #Marblemania dev... Even though the piece is about the movement/evolution of these fluid shapes, here's an unsorted collection of 200 work-in-progress stills (duration ~1:40), showing various corners of the design & parameter space explored. Most of them are still kept in principle... All variations are created by the same generative system (agents, boids & softbody physics) and visualized via a single shader (main work done in vertex stage) which is functionally composed (via higher-order shader functions, written in https://thi.ng/shader-ast, then dynamically transpiled to GLSL) based on ~50 of the over 100 design & behavior params...

(Side note for the more technical: There's only a single disc geometry per cell/shape group [solid, dot grid, poisson dots] — everything else is instanced...)

This week I will look into different alternative options to re-publish this project. My current bias is towards curating a relatively small collection and putting it up on OBJKT, but grateful about other ideas/recommendations... 🙏

#GenerativeArt #ThingUmbrella #WebGL

#Marblemania - A form and motion study inspired by marbling techniques like French curls and #Suminagashi (Japanese style), but also by the beautiful shapes and movements of Von Kármán vortices and the space-filling skin patterns of Bornella anguilla (aka the "Circle Packing" nudibranch)...

Update: Original 07/07 launch aborted, new release details TBC...

#GenerativeArt #WebGL #Boids

Beautiful Von Kármán vortices as seen from space. Also one of the main inspirations for my upcoming #Marblemania genart piece on which I've been working & tweaking for way too long (since Feb 😱)...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SawKLWT1bDA

Since this project has really been a form & motion study (or rather form through motion), here's a little video taster of just a single random variation...

(See https://mastodon.thi.ng/@toxi/110553814835244481 for more context)

#MarbleMania #SoftbodyPhysics #GenerativeArt #WebGL #ThingUmbrella

Long time no see... been working hard to get #MarbleMania finished (plus a ton of other things) and out of my system! This is the last work-in-progress share before the drop (still this month, details TBD).

Learned so much working on this, and the project confirmed (yet again) having mostly taken the right decisions in #ThingUmbrella architecture/tooling, some of it finally getting put more thoroughly through its paces (e.g. https://thi.ng/shader-ast, https://thi.ng/webgl & https://thi.ng/timestep).

The piece processes ~5 million vertices per frame, heavily using instancing and most of the work being done by the functionally composed vertex shader (via the Shader-AST DSL) and a CPU-side boids sim for the ~400 cells/droplets and swirls...

#GenerativeArt #Marbling #SoftbodyPhysics #Boids

In love with those colors & shapes and can't wait to share more variations... especially animated!

#GenerativeArt #WebGL #ThingUmbrella #Marblemania