Soft body jellyfish simulation
Live Site CodeMedusae started as a few simple prototypes to test a realtime physics system I was working on and slowly bloomed into a complex exploration of simulation based animation and procedural art making.
The project became a bit of an obsession for me as I tinkered with constraints and designed various components of jellyfish anatomy. As a physically based simulation, minimal input results in generative yet deterministic organic movement which can be quite mesmerizing. For example – a tap on the hood emits a nudging force which perturbs the jellyfish core, and the hood muscles are continuously expanding and contracting which cascades into the undulating motion of the tentacles.
All geometry and physical constraints are procedurally generated through hand-coded methods, which was fairly tedious. A few years after I finished this project, I began experimenting with ideas for more intuitive ways to graphically edit similar types of simulation based animation. These experiments eventually led to the project, Microbium.