R eact

 
 
C  ontents
 
   
 
A  bout the tool
This tool implements reaction diffusion, a simple technique to generate textures by smoothing them out. The difference with a regular blur filter is that the texture pixels are interacting : pigment flows from one cell to the next (technically 'diffusion', but called 'Smoothing' in React), while at the same time pigment disappears and reappears (the 'Growth'). The net results are textures that have a blobby, sometimes 'viral' look and feel -- and they always tile.

A number of examples is available on the sample page.

 
   
 
R  eleases
The tool is far from finished right now. It works, it shouldn't crash, but it is a bit limited in what it can do. The GUI also leaves something to be desired.

The current version of the tool is 0.1. It supports :

  • Realtime monitoring of the 'growing' of the texture
  • Saving the output to tga images
  • Loading tga images so they can serve as initial pigment or growth distribution
    • Note : uses only the red component for now
    • Note : if the dimensions don't match the gridsize, the tga is cropped
  • Synthesizing images of arbitrary dimensions, including non-square non-power-of-2
  • Basic reaction diffusion, including anisotropic diffusion/smoothing
  • Possibility to Undo the last iteration step, in case you saw something interesting flashing by and want to go back -- or in case it just numerically blows up
    • Note : it's interesting to point out that after blowing up, the system sometimes reverts to a normal image !
  • Ability to freeze the grids or the growth pattern individually
  • Ability to speed things up by not watching (= refreshing to screen) images
Obviously missing are :
  • Ability to control the synthesis direction
  • More procedural options for the Growth pattern
  • More options to convert the floating data into 0..255 ranged colors
  • More fill-noise features
  • Color ?
  • JPEG ?

This program is freeware : you can distribute and copy it at will as long as you do so at no charge, except for charges to cover the carrying media. The software may be repacked as part of a package as long as the original ZIP file is included unmodified.

Version 0.1, 06/02/2002

react.zip ??? bytes



If it complains about "msvcp60.dll not found", put this file (115795 bytes) in your c:\windows\system.

Sites : Email : rat@planetquake.com Using this email alias instead of rat@larian.com should provide faster response.

 
 
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