LO – 02 (Generative Art)

For this week’s LO, I took a closer look at Collider by Robert Hodgin, who does a lot of work in 3D terrain simulations like this one. The concept behind the project is exploring a simulated particle system interacting with a universal gravitational force that is coded in.

I really enjoyed the way that this project took a simple physics concept and was able to visualize it in such a beautiful way to show the intersection between scientific and visual methods of communicating information. Not only is it visually pleasing to look at, it also demonstrates the theories of universal gravitation in a tangibly interactive way.

Robert Hodgin’s work is primarily done in Houdini and C++, for which he is a co-creator of Cinder C++, a free open-source library designed to be a resource for endeavors of creative coding in the aforementioned language.