generative flocking bangle rendering

The charming Colin Haentjens showed me how to use the V ray render on Rhino today, so I have some snazzy high def images of some new meshes generated from my flocking simulation. The colored ones are higher resolution OpenGL renderings straight from Processing (pretty nice right?), and the others I made in Rhino.

For a quick refresher (original post) these bangles are the product of generative user interactive particle system. The particles naturally exhibit flocking/swarming behavior that the user can manipulate while the form is "growing". After completion the mesh can be iteratively smoothed or subdivided (though usually the geometry is too complex for noticeable subdivision). The meshes are exported from Processing as .STLs which can immediately either be thrown into Rhino or Solidworks for further manipulation or to be 3D printed.

3d flocking with Perlin noise from Alex Wolfe on Vimeo.