Technique · Fields
Filament web
A glowing tangle of fine straight filaments in drifting regions of pink, orange and blue, with white-hot centres and bright nodes.
Filament web is a field drawn for every pixel by the graphics chip. Every piece on Synapse Drip is made from a recipe that layers techniques like this one, and you can change any of it in the Studio.
Good to know
- Maps of millions of galaxies show them strung along filaments around voids, like the web here, and the filaments carry the gas that feeds galaxies.
- Slime moulds grow networks of tubes between food sources that resemble the rail system of Tokyo: in a 2010 experiment, Atsushi Tero and colleagues showed a mould finding a network of similar efficiency.
- Cracks in drying mud meet three at a time, and the polygons they cut out are close to Voronoi cells, which is why mud flats and this web look related.
- On the largest scales, galaxies are arranged in a web of filaments and sheets around enormous voids; the filaments are hundreds of millions of light years long.
- A Voronoi diagram gives each seed the region of space nearer to it than to any other seed, and its edges are straight because each is exactly halfway between two seeds.
- The neurons of the brain form a web through thousands of connections each; Santiago Ramon y Cajal, who shared the 1906 Nobel Prize for showing that they are separate cells, drew them in ink.
The mathematics
- A Voronoi edge is where the distances to the two nearest seeds are equal, so F2 - F1 = 0; the width of a filament is a Gaussian in F2 - F1, here about 0.020 of a cell, and thickening it simply widens the Gaussian.
- Where Voronoi cells meet, almost always exactly three do, so every node is a Y and no two edges cross: that is the branching look of the web.
- Each edge's hash is computed from the ids of the two cells it separates, so both sides agree on whether it is kept, and about 72 percent survive.
In art
- Cell-like and web-like forms in generative art draw on the microscope plates of the nineteenth century, such as those in Ernst Haeckel's books.
- A dark ground with a few strong, hot centres is the language of astrophotography, where colour is often assigned to the light from different elements.
More ways to use it
Related techniques
Nebula and stars · Liquid · Droplets · Network · Terrain and maps · Neuron · Order to chaos · Fractal tree