Particle Life is a new(ish), super popular autonomous agent system that is able to produce very organic, microorganism-like patterns with particles. So of course we had to build our own version in Houdini, right? In this video we’ll cover the basic ideas of Particle Life and build it as a POP force, which works both in 2D and 3D.
Links mentioned in the video:
Original Algorithm by Jeffrey Ventrella
Particle Life Video by Tom Mohr
– is there a way of using more than 4 types of particles — I am unsure at the moment about how you would increase the matrix size? — say I would like 11 different particles —- the “matrix parms = ch4(“parameters”)” only gives up to 4×4 obviously — can we push beyond that?
You can, but it will get more cumbersome. As a quick fix i’d replace the matrix parameter with a float array. Just make sure the array has 121 entries for 11 particle types.
So replace:
matrix parms = ch4(‘Parameters’);
With:
float parms[] = {1.0, 0.0, 3.0, 5.2, 0.1, …};
And in line 22 replace:
getcomp(parms, i@type, ntype)
With:
parms[i@type*11 + ntype]
In that last line, make sure the multiplier for i@type matches the number of particle types in your setup.