Cracking and Branching Techniques?

I think you've already gotten beyond me in terms of technical skill- but I'd recommend trying a threshold on some fancy combo of noises.

Here's my three second attempt:

Inky tendrils...

I'm not sure how this one happend, actually. It sort of branches. Weird effects when you roll the perlin angles around.

Switching over to chaffs.

As far as branching concerns... this might be nice to look into http://www.filterforge.com/filters/4867.html

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Redcap wrote: This is the easiest way I have found, and it gets nice effects: Expierment with chaffs and what have you for different effects: Plus super fast!

Yeah, that incredibly clever and non-obvious high pass trick is how I'm doing the ones above. (I pulled it off of Kochubey's very fine old photograph filter. http://www.filterforge.com/filters/5075.html) Very nice and crack-like result; not to mention super fast.

I have no idea why this high pass thing works the way it does. If you take patterns and and combine them, then they start to branch and criss-cross. (See attached file.) I've got two crossing perlin noises acting as the noise and the background respectively for a third noise (chaffs or otherwise)

I like how it looks, but it's very non-directional. Would be nice to have some way of making more splitting and branching happen to a linear input. Maybe offsetting through something like a scales pattern...

Crack Snippet 4.ffxml

Yes, high pass with stones and some noise distortion is what comes to mind looking at the samples.

Another thing that could help make it look like a branching pattern could be overlaying two (or more) noises and blending them with a thresholded stone pattern, so that one pattern comes through in the "white stones" and the other in the "black stones." This way there would a a discontinuity in the pattern which would look like cracks or branching. At least in theory -- haven't tried it.

(The thresholding stone pattern itself would have to be made into branches or cracks as well with high pass and blended with the above mix.)

Hope that was at least somewhat understandable. If not, I'll make a sample filter.

Same filter, using a more contrasty perlin noise to control threshold:



That's with stones. Chaffs might work better.

Seems like some blurring before the threshold might help make the branches thinner/more sparse, if that hasn't been done yet (I haven't looked inside any of these filters, just read the thread).

jffe

Sorry, here is the pick.

P.S. Corvus, I found the same highpass method from the exact same filter

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ThreeDee wrote: Yup, spideys are running wild tonight.

Hey, that's definitely looking more crack-like and branching.

So, ThreeDee (O Master of the offset node) how would one go about making this transformation? (see image) Is this even possible?

...or maybe, if we're really nice, FF can implement some component that works like context free.

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Sjeiti wrote: ...or maybe, if we're really nice, FF can implement some component that works like context free.

That would be cool... It might be tough to get a balance between 'powerful scripting featureset' and 'easy to use'.

Is Context Free sort of like Processing? http://processing.org/

Do you use Context Free a lot Sjeiti?

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Is Context Free sort of like Processing?

No, Processing is an abstraction layer upon Java, it was created to make Java accessible for non-programmers.
Context Free has it's own language. But I wouldn't call it a programming language, it's more a markup language. But I haven't used Context Free a lot. Did do lot's of Processing though.

That's awesome. How did you do it?

This is more along the line of a sensible method:



This is done basically in two branching steps, with multiple smaller branches at a time.

15 times faster than the slow method.

One more level of branching added:

Yup, nice work TD!

And yet another, semidecomposed one.

Improved forked lightning based on today's experimentation.

Wow, great stuff ThreeDee! The fisrt branching test (highpass style) reminds me of a city from the air. It has a very road-like feel. The forked lightning is also great.

Hi Corvus, thanks! I think I figured out how I wanna do my new-and-improved forked lightning. It's something between the last two filters. The second one can do uniform lines and the one prior to that can make it realistic looking. Need to combine the best parts of both. The good news is, both render fast. Gotta try it tomorrow.

cool. i want to use it in my 'storm clouds' filter (as yet unpublished due to waiting for lightning). so, the sooner you can post or publish, that would be excellent! and if you cant or decide not to, send it to me email. i really want a good lightning for that filter and i just never cracked the lightning effect.