How to make a fading feedback TOP without level?

Beginners
1

Hello everyone, I’m a little new here. I tried to make the Cyclic Diffusion-Limited Aggregation from this tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKiK9G53WOw
But I wanted to improve it a little bit by making it so that after a while the pattern begins to disappear, so that this process of “trampling paths” constantly supports itself and does not come to a dead end.

I used feedback and inserted the level TOP as usual, but then I realaized that it’s not working because of LumaBlur.
I invented for myself the Xor operation in composite, so I duplicated the chain of nodes, made a delay for it and reversed color to black so the picture started fading, but it just comes to a dead end too. I tried to loop it on itself to “clear” feedback and LumaBlur in “black” part of the chain, but here is the warning “cook dependency loop” appeared and everything stopped.
I would be grateful for help with resolving the obsession in my strange method or any solution to the problem of creating a self-sustaining drawing in general.
NewProject.2.toe (5.0 KB)

2

This is a quick reply without yet checking your project file, but reading your case reminds me of what I tried doing in my own experiments when I wanted to introduce “self cleaning” into the growth feedback loop.

I was using floating point values for pixels to keep track of their “age” by adding to them a fixed value each frame. I may have been doing this in a separate “buffer” or maybe just the alpha channel, I can’t remember specifics. It was more like data than something meant to be seen.
…but with this, you can then use something like a limit TOP to set an upper limit to the “age” by having the pixel values cycle back to 0 after reaching a certain arbitrary “age” value that you define, effectively making a type of “reset” for pixels.

1 Like
3

Thank you, I will try something with that!