Perlin Fields (1/100)

Since we are just beginning the 100 days of generative art, Perlin fields are probably a good place to start. You can find out all about Perlin noise here, but long story short, random noise looks like static and has sharp changes whereas Perlin noise has smoothness to it.

The general idea of the image to the left is that we generate a 2D Perlin noise field, —for those in processing thats easy to achieve by using noise(x,y) — then we drop a some particles on that field and simulate their motion.

The noise value at each point is treated as an angle. In order to figure out where a particle is going to move at each time step we just move it in the direction of the angle. After about a thousand time steps you end up with the generated image.