Flight of the Fireflies

Description

The notion of biological clocks is fascinating, and I like the idea that fireflies, with their differing frequencies and appearance during the night can function as a sort of clock. So for this sketch, I made a simple particle system, and used some shaders to make everything look nicer.

Design Process

There are several layers; first, a background layer with a gradient shader that I made (it is also using some common noise functions that I borrowed from elsewhere and attributed). This forms the backdrop to make the fireflies appaer more dramatic. The fireflies themselves are just circles. Origionally, I wanted them to interact with each other, but that proved to be too difficult for one week, so for now, they are subject to random forces in such a way as to make their movement appear insect like enough. Besides, this, they have a glow shader that I also borrowed from the web and modified for my own purposes. Fireflies must have a glow. Finally, everything is composited in a final shader pass. This might not be a necessary pass (can be integrated into the bloom pass) but felt clean enough because modifying library code feels a little weird. Besides that, I used chroma.js to transition the gradient colors for the sky, since it is wonderful for color manipulation.

Reflection

In future incarnations, I would like to imporove the particle system so that the particles can (EFFICIENTLY!) detect each other and act when needed (perhaps fireflies gravitate towards others with the same frequency and/or phase; otherwise, they can slowly align frequencies and phases until they are a big shouting light organism like in the wild. ). Anyways, this was a lot of fun, and I'm looking forward to the next assignment already!