Red Streamlines

2003
Source: 2003

Mark J. Stock

Red Streamlines , ongoing
Documents
  • Red Streamlines
    image/png
    512 × 512
Description
The essential component of wavy flow is the vortex. In isolation, a single vortex simply influences its surroundings to orbit around itself at a speed proportional to the inverse square of the distance to the vortex's axis. When a large number of vortexes are put together in a specific pattern, certain large-scale shapes can be created; when put together in a statistically-significant pattern, true fluid turbulence can be simulated; but when completely disorganized, they describe the flowfield seen here. This image represents 1000 streamlines in a field of 10,000 vorticies.
Keywords
  • subjects
    • Art and Science
      • algorithms
      • dynamical systems
      • mathematics
  • technology
    • software
      • Linux
Technology & Material
Software
The artist composed a Fortran program running on a Linux operating system which simulates the motion of vortex particles in 3D space. This image is composed of streamlines traced through a turbulent flow field. The resulting geometry was rendered with Radiance, a synthetic pseudo-radiosity raytracer, at 24k x 24k.
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Bibliography