Material Study
Pigment
A field of colored pigment becomes a tactile canvas. Drag through the powder to carve, push, mix, and reshape it, then send the composition airborne and watch it settle into something new.
A field of colored pigment becomes a tactile canvas. Drag through the powder to carve, push, mix, and reshape it, then send the composition airborne and watch it settle into something new.
Settled pigment as accumulated material rather than as sprites.
Stops the simulation and the interaction, top-down.
Draw the accumulated deposit as a material.
Draw the individual grains over the deposit.
How much floor each grain of chalk covers.
Coverage at which powder starts replacing grains.
Coverage at which the powder has replaced them entirely.
How particulate the surface's own edges are.
How far incomplete coverage breaks into islands.
The chalk grain itself, in cycles per world unit.
Soft irregularity in how the powder piled up.
Broad variation in how much chalk landed where.
How unevenly the bed is deposited at the largest scale.
The same, at the scale of a patch of powder.
How proud a dense deposit stands, in world units.
How rough the powder is at grain scale.
How far two overlapping pigments mix as grains.
How hard a leading pigment suppresses the runner-up.
The dominance ratio below which a runner-up vanishes.
How large a knot of the minority pigment is.
How strongly accumulated depth reads as thicker powder.
How far the pigment reads as colourant in white filler.
How unevenly a dense bed carries its own colour.
How dark the pores between grain clusters go.
The faintest deposition, beyond the visible field.
How much the floor darkens beneath its own powder.
How deeply dense powder swallows a coarse fragment.
Size multiplier on the two coarse classes.
Dragging the pointer through settled powder.
Radius of the fingertip, in world units.
How much of the fingertip is actually in contact.
How far the material consequences of the stroke reach.
How hard powder on the centreline is pushed aside.
Multiplies every force the stroke applies.
How hard settled powder resists material pushed into it.
How firmly the fingertip wins the material it is touching.
How much velocity is absorbed and redirected at a density rise.
How strongly material under the fingertip is carried with it.
Share of fine pigment that keeps its velocity longer.
How quickly carried pigment is dropped again.
How unevenly the stroke takes material at all.
How incoherently material falls out behind the finger.
Multiplies the class-dependent Coulomb friction.
The resting field the piece opens on.
How far the resting deposit spreads across the floor.
The rupture, and how hard it throws.
Overall launch energy.
How much the burst is turned toward vertical.
How far the burst spreads horizontally.
Size of the synthetic handful the opening deposit is transported from.
The hand opening — how the compressed mass pushes out of itself.
Peak outward acceleration as the handful unconfines.
How strongly the push is biased sideways.
How far a coherent field bends the outward push.
Where a returning bloom lands — the field it is aiming to become.
How firmly falling pigment is steered toward a useful field.
How much floor the intended composition covers.
How much airborne dust avoids ground that is already deep.
Temporary granular sheets — how long compressed grains keep company.
How hard a patch holds the grains inside it.
Seconds from release to entirely independent grains.
How much of the handful was compressed hard enough to hold together.
How fast a patch elongates along its own axis.
What the pigment is travelling through once it has been thrown.
How hard the air pushes the pigment around.
Eddies larger than the bloom. Bends whole regions.
Cloud folds, curls, lobes and pockets.
Downward acceleration, before per-class mass.
How quickly the air takes the launch energy back.
Air dragged upward by the throw itself.
Seconds before the lifted column dissipates.
How much of each scale of pigment there is.
Barely visible particles. The bulk of the cloud.
Visible grains of pigment.
Larger grains, mostly ballistic.
Compressed lumps, seeded as clusters that come apart
Multiplier on every grain's radius.
Light, and how much of the frame the pigment covers.
Key and fill together.
Global opacity of every particle.
How compressed pigment comes apart in the air.
How fast a clump weakens simply from being airborne.
How hard the pieces push apart as they come loose.
Development controls. Not part of the piece.
Time scale.
Freezes the pigment where it is.