Final - Luke changes his mind

So I was looking at my terrain/island generator, thinking about what Elle and Richard said about it being a bit too literal and a bit too "floaty islands in Avatar", and reached a point where I didn't think I could take it further. It is too rigid, although I am fond of it and will use the concepts I learned for other applications.

Further back in my blog history, before I handed in project 1, I was exploring another sort of random walk with strings of polygons in 3D space. I revisited this and managed to find some remarkably organic motion when animating a single polygon string, smoothly changing the angles between each polygon. After a chat with Elle, she suggested I see where I can take this before hand in and if I can improve its aesthetics.

This still fits into my core idea of using random walks to build complexity, ultimately ending up with something we read as organic rather than inorganic and computerised. The islands code generated forms that read like organic terrain, but they had no element of motion. The polygon stream code is a little less organic in form, in some cases, but it's motion is variable and unpredictable in a very eye catching and natural way.

The alpha is tuned to highlight the interactions between polygons, rather than the polygons themselves, in order to further remove the resulting image from its beginnings.

To talk directly about the brief, the randomness in this project is in the net construction. It chooses a side of the polygon, and an angle to fold by, then attaches another polygon to that side with that angle of rotation, and repeats. When these fold angles are incremented over time in the animation, the motion that emerges is a function of the initially random selected angles and directions.

The control I exhibit is in the number of sides of each polygon, the range of angles available to select, the colour ranges, speed of motion, in other words general aesthetic direction. I have constrained the resulting strings (and actually placed 4 of them in the scene) in every other way to achieve interesting motion, and to show as much as possible to the viewer of what is unfolding. Crucially, the motion is smooth because the folding angles are not chosen randomly at each step, they are instead chosen randomly once and then a random seed is used to recreate them identically (but incremented slightly, to animate) each frame. Were the motion not smooth, the organic properties of the whole piece would be destroyed, so controlling this aspect of randomness was incredibly important to my project.