POP Gas

[Macha]

Just thought this is interesting. I made a particle gas which looks like it exhibits something like brownian motion. It's very simple, fast and seems stable.

I used an expression in the interact pop with a nearestdistance attribute to drive the behavior.

[Macha]

Here the particles create a self-contained shape (no external attractors or collision objects). The pressures equal out and the particles arrange themselves into loose strings. If I adjust the parameters I can create "atoms" whizzing about, joining temporarily into "molecules", and braking apart again.

[Macha]

(yes, I do have too much free time on my hands.)

I started off with a sphere and some simple interaction rules and I get quite an interesting pattern with hexagons made of pentagons made of quadrilaterals. It eventually stabilizes into a wriggling network with some kind of structure to it.

I wonder if that is something inherent in the rules or an effect of accumulating errors.

[Macha]

another one. In fact, this only works if the points start of at the surface. If I scatter them inside the object they remain more or less stable and boring and even retain the original shape (sphere, box, pyramid, etc)

Edited December 16, 2009 by Macha

[Macha]

I think this is what happens: The perfect symmetry of the sphere is broken by tiny errors (oversampling delays collapse) and along the edges of an icosahedral shape points escape upwards or downwards. They in fact create a second or even third shell for a while. Then at one point it goes all wonky and the thing explodes into a weird shape that is not quite random.