I felt like blowing off some thinking-too-hard steam by whipping up a little gravity/flocking sketch. After using Processing for a little under a year now, it's amazing how quickly sketches like this come together. For example, I have a Target3D interface with a couple different implementations...this one just uses some Brownian motion. It gives the particles something to steer towards. There's the hacked up Vector3 class, and an often-reached-for RingList.java. It's a few lines of glue, and you're off.
It's just nice to crack open Eclipse, and go straight to tweaking The Interesting Stuff.
I tried focusing only on color for the first one.
Then, I tried focusing only on shape for the second fellow. Totally inspired by Robert Hodgin's batshit prints shown here (the non-butterfly ones).
That shallow depth of field really gets me going. These are both the same chunk of code, with the same random seed, so there's some spot where the line up, but I didn't really feel like tracing that down. I have a feeling I edited that out of the color one.
Yeah, it's quick. I think I'm entirely incapable of waiting longer than an evening for something to render.
Oh, yeah. And careful with that RingList. It's barely implemented. I just thought I'd share. I'm using it for the tails in this code.