Particle Magic Experiments
I saw Ralph Hauwert‘s piece for LetItBloom and I have been intrigued by it for months. At some point I’ve had enough and I decided to go after it and see how it works. I came up with 2 versions of this particle engine.
Regenerating
The first version killed every particle that went off screen. The dead particle are born again in random places in the canvas. That turns the canvas slightly noisy since there’s particles being born everywhere. On the other hand, you can see how the forcefield is impacting the particles. The force fields of the text in the middle would slow the particles a bit down and make them live inside the letters until they go away.
Swarm
The second version would generate a slightly less noise forcefield that would make the particles move in swarms. Whenever a pixel goes offscreen it rerturns on the other side of the canvas. So the particles never die and are never reborn. The text forcefields act like a wall. Whenever a particle hits a letter, it stops moving.
If you’re interested in seeing how it looks in action: Check out Regeneration and Swarms.
