hi friends,
I’m very interested in the kind of visualizations that involve particle systems with dynamics that remind of fluids. I admire the work of Refik Anadol in installations like melting memories and the latest, quantum memories. He and his team manage to create these shapes that have a lot of consistency and yet when you look closely they seem to be composed of fine particles that often detach and move away from the main shape. Does anybody have any idea about what kind of strategies they are using? Are they maybe using fluid solvers like flex or just alg that imitates fluids like curl noise; are they using special particle systems or are there other things involved?
any tips super welcome, thank you 
One thing to realize is, from what I’ve seen all his stuff is pre-rendered. This means you can’t compare to real-time tool like TouchDesigner in terms of visual quality and possible options for art direction, and possible later passes of VFX added to make it look smoother.
@nettoyeur thank you, I had heard that they worked a lot with vvvv, that’s why I thought that maybe they were using similar tools, but if as you say their stuff is pre-rendered then it would be a whole different ballgame of course, if they were using things like maya, houdini, etc
@nettoyeur but actually I remember an article about melting memories in which Refik clearly explained that they used vvvv, which as we know is the same kind of platform as touchdesigner (I very much prefer touchdesigner personally ), so that would indicate that at least in melting memories they were using vvvv; in fact here is one of the references:
https://vvvv.org/blog/engram-data-sculpture-for-melting-memories
“We wanted to do this efficiently and in real time and so working on Melting Memories dovetailed nicely with putting the last touches on FieldTrip, an (at the time pre-release) open source GPU library for HLSL/VVVV. It allowed us to use a composite design pattern to very quickly iterate while producing the aesthetic structures used in the project. This approach enabled us to really explore some deeper procedural functions whilst keeping a completely modular graphics pipeline. This modularity makes it easy and clean to expand on the project’s abstracted content in really interesting ways, such as further integration of machine learning on the source data, evolving rendering techniques
and the creation of sculpted physical artifacts.”
actually in his own website Refik includes the reference about the use of vvvv:
so this seems to indicate that what they do should be reachable in a platform like TD