Video: FastLED simplex noise modulated by itself

[StefanPetrick]

Hello everybody,

I just wanted to show you an animation I created today.

It´s basically only one 16x16 layer of noise data. I used several points in that array to manipulate the x, y, z coordinates and the x & y scaling of the calculated noise space. Another point is used to control the colorshift within a predefined color palette (the orange - blueish one). The palette itself could be controlled by noise data also, but I decided to keep the basic colors within a given range.

To make the colormapping a bit more interesting I added a second layer from the HSV spectrum based on the very same noise data with an inverted brightness mask.

The result is a vivid and ever-changing animation that fully controls itself. No external parameter, no random values, not even millis() is used. The only predefined influence is an increment of 1 of the 32 bit z value for every frame. I did this to make sure, that the animation never gets stuck in an infinite loop or a still frame in case all control points happen to become 0 at the same time. You never know.

Math is beautiful!

Hardware: Teensy 3.2 + 256 APA102s driven at 24 MHz. Runs at 280 fps @96 Mhz.

Greetings, Stefan

 

[potatotron]

This looks great! Is your code posted anywhere?

 

[StefanPetrick]

The interesting part I showed here.

In case there is any interest I could publish a complete "standalone" program as well. Right now it´s part of a bigger piece of code.

 

[StefanPetrick]

Here the complete code, so far only tested on a 16x16 but it should work with any matrix size. Feedback is welcome.

edit: Confirmed to work even on a 8x4 matrix.

 

[potatotron]

Thanks! I will play with this as soon as possible.

 

[StefanPetrick]

I got the particularly erratic movements smoother now by averaging every control point over 4 neighbor noise values.
I also added a noise influence causing the colormapping to become slightly desaturated controlled by the noise. That adds a bit more "breathing" to the animation. What do you think? Improving the effect or over the top?

 

[StefanPetrick]

Just a short report what I´m doing at my second day with the Teensy 3.6: 3 independant noise/RGB layers with slighly different 12-bit long color palettes. I added the layers at the end without any scaling in order to don´t lose color resolution. Float32 based noise now, in the videos before I used FastLEDs int16 version.

If you watch the video - please give it at least a minute before you judge. All the movements are very slow by purpose - so you can see the critical edges (where the colors are close to black) better. Still 3x8-bit APA102s. At the end of the video I lift the diffusor.

Résumé: The 3.6 has an amount of calculation power that allows animations with a quality and precision that was unthinkable before.
Still >400 fps.