jangles-byte Generative Motion
The gap between a generative sketch and a generative artwork is almost never the algorithm — the algorithms are public and short. It is art direction: what the colour means, where the density sits, how slowly it evolves, and what you left out.
A tutorial renders the algorithm. A piece renders a decision.
Workflow
- Write the intent first, in two or three sentences: what the system is (embers on
a thermal, ink in water, a colony finding food), what the viewer should feel, and the
one property that earns colour. Skipping this is what produces rainbow noise.
The
design-directionskill's philosophy format applies directly. - Pick the system from references/systems.md — each entry
has the equations, the parameter ranges that actually look good, and its failure mode.
Its numbers are machine-checked:
validate/attractors.pyandvalidate/gray_scott.pyverify every attractor seed and reaction–diffusion pair on CPU in seconds. Run them after changing any value, and use them to find your own. - Build the field and the motion with references/noise-and-fields.md — noise, fbm, domain warping, curl. Most beautiful motion is a field being sampled.
- Decide CPU or GPU early with references/gpu-and-shaders.md. This is architectural, not an optimisation — some systems simply do not express themselves below a population the CPU cannot reach, and porting later means rewriting.
- Render it well with references/rendering.md — trails via accumulation, additive blending, envelopes so nothing pops.
- Map the field to the screen with references/density-and-tone.md. Accumulation buffers are unbounded and displays are not; this mapping is where technically-correct pieces most often look wrong.
- Finish it with references/post-processing.md — bloom, grain, vignette, grading. The cheapest quality per line of code in the discipline.
- Art-direct it against references/art-direction.md — the checklist that separates a piece from a screensaver.
- Watch it. Record with
../motion/scripts/capture-motion.pyand look at the result over a long run, not one frame. Generative work fails slowly: it looks great at 4 seconds and turns to grey mush at 60. When something is wrong, work references/diagnostic.md rather than tuning at random.
Which reference to load
| Situation | Load |
|---|---|
| Choosing a system; attractors, boids, physarum, reaction-diffusion, differential growth | references/systems.md |
| Noise, fbm, domain warping, curl fields, flow fields | references/noise-and-fields.md |
| Trails, blending, buffers, performance at scale | references/rendering.md |
| Going GPU: WebGL2 GPGPU, ping-pong, the float-extension minefield, shader systems | references/gpu-and-shaders.md |
| 3D: raymarched SDFs, smooth blending, domain repetition, instancing, camera | references/three-dimensional.md |
| Flat white, thin outlines, or any density-to-colour mapping | references/density-and-tone.md |
| Bloom, grain, vignette, aberration, feedback, colour grading | references/post-processing.md |
| It runs but looks like a tutorial | references/art-direction.md |
| It's black / saturating / dying / clumping / 4fps / grey mush | references/diagnostic.md |
Non-negotiables
- Colour is earned. Map it to a property the system actually has — velocity, curvature, age, density, divergence — never to a rainbow of hue over time. If colour encodes nothing, the piece reads as a demo.
- Seed the randomness. A composition you like must be recoverable; ship the seed.
- Delta-time everything, clamped. A field that runs at double speed on a 120Hz display is a broken piece, not a fast one.
- Evolve slower than feels right. Field evolution that reads as "alive" in the editor usually reads as "busy" on the wall. Halve it, then halve it again.
- Density needs negative space. A frame at uniform particle density is noise. Vary it, or crop into it.
- Verify parameters before quoting them. In attractors and reaction–diffusion alike, a value just outside the viable band produces nothing rather than something worse, so a plausible-looking number is not a usable one.
- Long-run test. Run it for a minute before shipping — trails saturate, particles clump in attractor basins, and energy either dies or explodes.