Beautiful Random FFTs September 22nd, 2009
Patrick Stein

Neil Baylis emailed me a program he had put together that puts a few random numbers in a grid and does the inverse FFT of them. His program cycles the values placed in the grid between -1 and 1 to animate some different effects. I like just regenerating random ones over and over again or tweaking which cells of the grid are in use. [You may already be on the same page as I am here, but I’ve got an idea kicking around now that I just have to try…. watch for it in a day or two.]

blob_thing Here is one of the nifty designs that I generated with his program. I encourage you to download it and play around a little bit. It is really great to see in real-time how activating certain frequencies affects the output.

For reference, blob_thing_grid here are the frequencies that I had activated for the above picture.

There are gorgeous specular features and shading in his output images. He could have just it left it flat-colored, but he went the extra distance to add a lighting model. The results are stunning. You should click on the above image to see it full-size. And, you should check out the the example on Neil’s page.

 

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