Stevie's GRAPHICS Page for Generated Textures

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 Fractal | Plasma | Marble

What's a Plasma?

A plasma can be defined as biased white noise.

Biased White Noise.  

 

We take an image and statistically analyse the shades after separating the primary colours (Red, Green and Blue).

From the analysis, we generate lines where the frequency of a particular shade matches the frequency of that shade in the original image. 

These lines are then shuffled and re-combined to produce the individual rows of the texture. While all the structure is lost and the result is purely random, the dominant shade of the original is retained.

Analysis 

 

 

 

Of course, if we had to store a sequence of numbers for each individual shade of plasma, the primary point of auto-generation would be lost.

Given the analysis, we can manipulate the data at various stages.

For example we can suppress the red or enhance the green.

This might be called filtering the input, or biasing it.

Manipulation

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We can smoothe the texture by adjusting the 'dynamic range' of the colours.

For example, after suppressing the red, we can manipulate the green component (just its maximum/minimum value, not its frequency in the texture)

Here we increase the green minimum and then reduce its maximum.

The result is a smoother, flatter texture, with none of that swirling 'boiling fluid' structure we normally see.

Smoothing 

 

 

The size of each pixel can be changed, in either direction, to produce uniquely different effects.

 

And the nature of the interpolation between them from block to linear can bring about quite realistic results.

 

Scaling 

 

A single original source image can be used to generate a huge number of completely different plasma textures .

All we have to store is the analysis and a note of the processes to achieve the effect we want.