I’ve been playing around with 3D curl noise for a while, and thought it would be cool to make it react to audio. After a lot of fiddling around, and after figuring out how to make vector fields rotationally symmetric, I want to share some WIP results here.
This is the Dream Sequence song from Clint’s challenge. The song is just too good to only play the same eight beats over and over:
You can find a proper render with a slightly different kind of animation here:
This one’s similar, but with “Siren of the Storm” from Hybrid:
And a full render:
I’m planning to write a proper blog post about this as a tutorial eventually, but for now this will have to suffice. The magic sauce in the simulation zone happens here:
The coordinate system is converted to polar coordinates first, then ping-ponged with pi/N, where N is the number of repetitions you want, and converted back to cartesian. This will give your 3D vector field rotational symmetry, but it will not give you the correct vectors yet. For that, you need to rotate them “outwards” so that they all line up properly.
For an expainer on the curl noise part, read this: Dance of the Wisps - Using Curl Fields for 3D Particle Simulations - #8 by sml