~ Oh boy, it's really been a while

I started working on this animation on Jun 11, 2021. Not more than a week later I had completely finished it, leaving me the hard task of writing a readme and posting the rendered output on my Instagram profile.

Well, I kind of completely forgot about the existence of this whole repository (despite me keeping close track of the things that I make and that I would love to post, instead of leaving them here to rot) until like a month ago.

It then took a whole month to find the courage to write this README in maybe 10 minutes. Damn anxiety.

This is another of the extremely over-engineered javascript animations that I then render and post somewhere on the internet. The slight issue this time is that the render time on this is so long that it makes basically no sense. I should use a framework more fitted to the heavy computation, discarding the live output in favour of the reduced animation time.

Javascript really helps my creative process because it allows me to view the output in real time, while any other language with an image creation library would not really allow me to do this. You could argue that by using a proper video engine (even the "simple" OpenGL) would be good enough for that, but i believe that just the trouble of setting it ip and the added complexity of a full-fledged 2D and 3D engine would not be worth it.

In these years I have been developing a simple and small boilerplate that allows me quickly create what I want with minimal hassle. Might stick to that bundle of terrible, badly documented code instead of creating the new bundle of... you get that.

The animation is composed by a bunch of "particles" (that look like wires or hairs) moving almost freely around a circle. Their position is determined by a force field generated by using open simplex noise. This requires a lot of calculations, but I like it enough to let it run at a whopping 3 seconds per frame (or about 0.33 fps).

There are 3 colour settings:

• black on white
• white on black
• coloured on white

I wanted to make 3 variations on the same theme in order to not screw up my tidy and ordered Instagram profile but then I screwed up along the way by realizing that I cannot really make 3 separate posts for each project.

Anyway, check the animation in my aforementioned Instagram profile or feel free to clone the repo and look at the videos inside the output folder.

If you are really lazy (like me), just scroll down a little bit. But be advised: these gifs are pretty choppy and really heavy.

When will GitHub start allowing videos or some more modern way of showing small animations on their readmes?

This project is distributed under Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license.