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2023-09-02modules/flow: minor cleanup of ff_new()/ff_free()Vito Caputo
Simplify ff_new() failure path by using ff_free(), also make ff_free() more ergonomic by returning NULL.
2023-09-02flow: implement a 3D flow field moduleVito Caputo
This is kind of a particle system, where the particles are pushed around through a 3D vector space treated as a flow field. No physics are being simulated here, it's just treating the flow field as direction vectors that are trilinearly interpolated when sampled to produce a single direction vector. That direction vector gets applied to particles near it. To keep things interesting the flow field evolves by having two distinct flow fields which the simulation progressively alternates sampling from. For every frame, both flow fields are sampled for every particle, but how much weight is given to the influence of one vs. the other varies by a triangle wave over time. When the weight is biased enough to one of the flow fields near a peak/valley in the triangle wave, the other gets re-populated while its influence is negligible, also interpolating its new values with 25% influence from the active field. The current flow field population routine is completely random. Yet there's a surprising amount of emergent order despite being totally randomized direction vectors. Currently supported settings include: size= the width of the 3D flow field cube in direction vectors (the number of vectors is size*size*size) count= the number of particles/elements speed= how far a particle is moved along the current sample's direction vector This was first implemented in 2017, but sat unfinished in a topic branch for myriad reasons. Now that rototiller has much more robust settings infrastructure, among other things, it seemed worth finishing this up and merging.
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