Matt Nelsen

OK, I’ve avoided making serious changes to my layout in favor of actually doing some, you know, posting, but I couldn’t resist redoing the site’s banner. Used this little beauty that I made with Chaoscope:

I’ve recently been playing with Chaoscope, software for rendering 3D strange attractors. Here is an example of a render of a type A polynomial as rendered by Chaoscope:

If you are interested in replicating this image, use the following factors: p0=0.271, p1=1.594, p2=1.122.

While the images that Chaoscope renders are quite interesting, they are based around an orthographic camera model - there is no vanishing point perspective. I decided that I should try to replicate these attractor systems in Blender. I modified some python code that I found here with the formulas that Chaoscope uses to produce this:

Later I want to modify this by adding more of the formulas that Chaoscope uses, especially the “Unravel” one, and to animate, both by moving through space, and by changing the attractor’s coefficients through time.

Ben Fry of Processing fame took the code from classic Atari console cartridges and created several beautiful images showing code and bitmaps, with links drawn from the jump instructions. Here is a small section from Pac-Man:

I kind of miss the days when computer games had to fit into such a small memory space.

I’ve spent a lot of time trying to come up with simple cloud systems to use with Blender. This is the result of one test, in which I used the Python scripting interface to create a model using a random walk.
In a random walk you start at the origin and select a random direction to move one space. Repeat. After many thousands of repetitions I was left with a cloud of vertices. I applied a red halo material to the cloud model and rendered.
The very first render produced a very pleasant result. As a still image. Right away I tried to animate this scene, as a single frame renders very quickly. Unfortunately, since all the vertices are placed at regular intervals, once the image moves, artificial structure becomes very easy to see.
I may have to try this again with a random jump between steps in the random walk. Another challenge for making this a good cloud material is to figure out a way to animate the structure of the cloud itself.