(webgl required)
Mostly just got stuff in place to get on this next cycle of R&D. Got this new page made and working, did a lot of reading, and wrote some code that doesn't work yet. Unfortunately some people wanted to pay me to do "real" work during the time I had set aside for this OAD, so here's to all the half finished fantastics that could have but never were.
Great success! I can now animate particles! (they animate on page refresh) turns out I had it most of the way there yesterday, but I needed to set:
particles.geometry.attributes.position
.needsUpdate = true
So now I'm well on my way to having relatively easy access to do what ever I want with the point attributes! I was going to throw on some curl noise, but there werent any obviously/easilly available libraries for that and my ablity to read that level of mathematical syntax is still just slightly not there (though I think I'm getting close). When I do that I'm sure I'll be able to find some other code examples to learn from, but for now I'm just happy to have some basic animation happeneing without having to change more fundamental stuff under the hood.
Also started adding some basic interactivity on mouse over, but that's more for tomorrows OAD
More big progress today. Did a lot of refactorin and am starting to figure out these animations. They still look bad, but that shouldnt be too hard of a fix. (at least once I have some more systems implemented). Right now I'm just animating basic speed, but hopefully I'll be able to get velocity vectors happening soon.
The thing I'd really like to highlight today is that I added a rest position attribute so now we can move the particles with a mouse interaction and then have them return to their original coords.
One thing I'm not really thrilled about is the mouse interaction with the particles. it seems a little clunky. I think in the future it'll be better because I'll have the mouse affect the vector field (to be created) and then have the vector field affect the particles. I might also switch things up so they are basically a 2d plane of particles since I think that's more of what the final product will want to be anyway, but I'm not sure...... If the final result will be 2d should I just be using P5? hmmmmmm that might be something to look at.....
Had a lot of good ideas last night, but was only able to impement fuzzy logic for returning to the particle rest position and start on changing over from maniuplating the position directly to using velocity