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Hair

While experimenting how to computationally simulate a thread, I have been wondering what I could do if I could use physical simulations as a material of expression. I developed Hair in C++ (using openFrameworks) so I could have easy control over the physical and aesthetic parameters of hair like elements in a 2D space, in a similar way that we can mix ink on a canvas or use Photoshop.

How many times have you observed a framed painting in the last 3 years? How many times have you stared at devices' screens in the last 3 days? Which programming languages do you think would Van Gogh be using to express himself had he been born 20 years ago?

The software was developed in openFrameworks, a free, open-source C++ framework which is built on top of OpenGL. The software allows the exploitation of the aesthetic possibilities of dynamically simulating hairs in a 2D space. Using a GUI, the user can add hairs to the scene and modify their physical and aesthetic parameters such as the length of the hair strand, its number of particles, damping and stiffness coeficient between the particles, friction with the medium, color, thickness, etc. Customizable perlin noise grids can be used in order to help designing how and where forces should be applied to the hairs, making it possible to generate more organic and fluid looking movements. The source code can be found here.