Particle UV Blending
This is a system I’m working on that tries to maintain the natural movement of surface UVs on a noisy particle simulation without setting up rest positions.
It can be used to add and blend textures on continuously evolving fluid surfaces and produce organic effects like liquid gold, glitter, and paint swirls.
Notes
The main idea here is to assign attributes to new particles in a simulation, and then kill them before they have time to thoroughly mix with other particles from differing birth times. This is achieved by spawning particles with short lifespans on a predefined path. New particles inherit UVs from the input path and then die before they have time to thoroughly mix with other particles. The result is an organic particle sim where all neighboring particles have similar attributes (like color and UVs).
This method can be used in instances where the dual-rest solver produces an unwanted blending effect on a chaotic loop of particles.
It also works well with using source imagery to generate custom color palettes for the blended textures.
I initially started developing this for my personal project, From Earth, but didn’t finished it in time to make it into my animation. It is not as precise as something like a dual rest system, but it’s nice for quickly getting a bump map to stick to a chaotic particle mesh.