I’ve been experimenting with a few different techniques for viewing force attributes. I don’t know if this is helpful for others, but thought I’d share a few components that I’ve been experimenting with.
Force
Working with the Force Radial POP has often left me scratching my head for ways to anticipate how the forces might impact a particle system. This simple component takes another Force Radial POP along with an arbitrary field of points to help see the “shape” of the force you’re generating:
Arrows are aligned to the direction of the force, scale is derived from the magnitude of the force, color is just another way to visualize the force as a gradient:
There’s no magic in here, but some of these ideas can be helpful when you’re trying to have a touchstone for how the attributes in your networks are going to impact movement - especially when it comes to particles.
Really interesting and useful choices - red hot, down to 0 length as it gets to 0, and then all points outside the field are still visible as little blue dots, which is also useful for context.
For the random point generator it’s key to get the size and position of its shape (box) and the density of points, balanced with the size of the vectors.
The velocity viewer is good too. Instead of vector length, it’s color that represents magnitude.
Here’s the same with the particles merged with the field.
Oh - I really like the idea of adding the particles back through the visualization of the forces.
For fields I’ve been thinking about visualization and triggers - especially when using a spec pop (focus on, how can I visually differentiate fields).
A good example use case here is you have some kinect / orbec / ouster point cloud and you want to know when some region has satisfied a density threshold to count as active. i.e. when someone is standing in this space, start a timer, etc.
I’ve made a few different variations of this that use a combination of sequential pars and some POP and CHOP tricks to build out a simple set of zone detection comps.
Output CHOPs have the active state of the fields, along with some metrics (how many points in the whole field, how many points in each zone, percentage of total points in each zone.
