[jongala]

I played around with some similar ideas, it's a really interesting corner of generative art, with lots of prior work.

For mine, I make fields by superimposing a bunch of harmonic functions. By playing with different periods, phases, etc. you can get some cool patterns that look irregular and interesting, though I think they have a different feel from some of these noise-based examples.

I also make some fields by using sources and sinks: a collection of points that push out or in. You don't need that many to make an interesting field.

For collision detection I use the trick @danbruc mentioned in another comment: I draw to an offscreen canvas, and just check pixel color to see if a trace is already there. It's probably very costly in terms of memory as a data structure, but it's very convenient :) https://www.instagram.com/p/CMi4QcXn6_y/?img_index=1

For me the interest has come in coloring the lines — by deferring rendering until after the path has been plotted, you can color different traces according to how long they are, how much they curve or change, etc. which can reveal interesting bits about the flow structure. https://www.instagram.com/p/CMvqZjkHYpV/?img_index=1

Thanks for this great writeup @tehrash, the explanations and examples are great!