Star Dance

Star Dance

This is a 100% generative animated project. Its creation was motivated by the beauty depicted in star trail photos that show the rotation of the earth relative to the stars using long exposures. What if the stars left trails like this on their own? What if they danced in intricate patterns?

One unique feature of this project is a slider that controls how abstract to render the output. It can vary from realistic starscapes to abstract geometric designs.

Star Dance has 40 distinct movement patterns. Each edition gets a set of about 18 patterns that repeat in an irregular fashion until the animation is stopped. The mixing of a new movement pattern with the previous state of the stars yields intricate beautiful designs. The speed can be set to high for an energetic animation or to very slow for a subtle barely noticeable result. The speed and a couple of other settings can be controlled after minting using URL parameters.

The art will fill the available space and adapt to different aspect ratios.

The Params define most but not all of the qualities of each edition. The primary things that vary with the random seed are: 1) the specific motion patterns used and their order, 2) the number and positions of trees, 3) the details of some motion patterns (for example there are many different kinds of spirals used), 4) the exact color noise added to the colors defined in the params, 5) position and phase of the moon, 6) accent slashes in the sky.

Most of the parameters are self-explanatory but here are a few things that are not obvious.

The alpha values for colors are ignored except for the moon and foreground. If they are set to alpha=0 then the moon and foreground do not get drawn.

Abstraction values over 50 use fewer stars but they are drawn using the 'style' parameter which gives each star a more complex appearance. Abstraction values also impact the moon and foreground unless the 'abstraction for' parameter is set to 'stars only'

Coherence controls how many of the stars follow a new movement pattern. At lower coherence values many of the stars will remain as they were after the previous pattern. This can leave visual echos of the previous patterns giving a more complex overall result. At coherence = 100 the stars will all follow the new pattern.

The theme pattern appears near the beginning and also appears more frequently than the others. Some patterns are less suitable for themes so there are 28 to choose from out of the complete set of 40. The preview image will be taken during the theme pattern.

The style only affects the star appearance for abstraction levels greater than 50.

When the special setting is 'erode foreground' the foreground and moon will gradually dissolve.

This is a 100% code generated project. Outputs are created in using fx(params) but the speed, abstraction, and coherence properties can be adjusted using URL parameters.

There are some keyboard operations also

Click on the output and use these keys to affect it:
'f' - freeze/unfreeze
's' - save a frame

URL Parameters: To change the speed, abstraction, and coherence values add URL parameters like:
?abstraction=80&speed=20&coherence=80
These values will override what was set at the time of minting.

Copyright 2023 Jeff Clark

100% generative

All drawing and geometric code created by Jeff Clark using standard javascript and canvas 2D api. Perlin noise was used with support from perlin.js at https://codepen.io/sixsided/pen/emxxea.js