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I work in CG animation, and one thing artists do when procedurally generating geometry is tweak the size distribution of things meant to mimic natural phenomena
by blevin 9y ago
I work in CG animation, and one thing artists do when procedurally generating geometry is tweak the size distribution of things meant to mimic natural phenomena, such as leaves and rocks. They are typically assembling these as expressions, so it's common to first reach for a simple uniform distribution in the form of scale*rand(), but more experienced folks know to go straight to a power law instead. I think it's fascinating that such an extremely high-level way to characterize natural processes could make it into an artist's toolkit like that.
- thinkfurther 9y agoI dabble in my own crap gamey stuff, and I use random [mostly 0-1] to power of something all the time; not because I know what I'm doing, but because it's simple and often good enough. I don't know math, but multiplying all sorts of things with each other to see what happens I can do; that and getting random numbers from perlin noise can cover a lot of sins, or at least make for a lot of fun :)
- GuiA 9y agoTo build on what 'blevin says, check out for instance https://bost.ocks.org/mike/algorithms/ https://bost.ocks.org/mike/algorithms/
- Scarblac 9y agoI don't quite get the relevance to his comment, but wow! What a great link.
- strainer 9y agoA smooth star cluster can be plotted by giving stars a normally distributed variate for each dimension. Normal distribution is the only kind which will result in a radially even cluster - any other distribution results in visible deformation over the dimensions axis. This geometric property of normal distribution is true for any number of dimensions.