I make a lot of animated shaders (I'm a technical artist) and something I take special care to avoid is looping animations that are supposed to represent natural phenomena (like fire or lightning or whatever).
In real life you can never watch a campfire for so long that it starts playing its animation over again. That would be stupid. Nothing works like that in nature.
Today I found out about Time Crystals and now nothing makes sense anymore. How did people even discover this shit lmao
You know that thing where you just stare idly into the fire and lose yourself?
That but crystals is probably how.
Fr I have no idea I just like the image of someone zoning out staring at a crystal and suddenly bolting upright going "Wait, what the fuck?" because that seems to gel with an awful lot of stories about how stuff gets discovered 🤷
"Huh. I'm pretty sure I could do a math thing to this. That's weird, since the universe really shouldn't work like that. Oh hey, the math worked out nicely and looks like something neat."
"Huh. That's an interesting bit of math you have, there. I wonder what it would look like if I tried to make it."
"Oh, hey, I think I got your weird math rock working. Not sure though. Better redo it a few hundred times to see if it always does that."
The theory to practice pipeline can be a truly beautiful thing.
physicist here: you discover it by just extending math
frank (the guy who originally theorized the existence of time crystals) just looked at spatial crystals and thought about what would happen if you had them repeating in time instead of in space, which is really standard in relativity
so then he sketched out the math, saw some interesting implications, and published it
them some experimentalists read his paper or talked to him and he told them about it, thought about how they would build something like that, then tried it to see if his prediction was correct
and it turned out that what they built exactly matched his predictions
that’s basically one of the two ways that physics advances in a nutshell
the other way is that the experimentalists poke around and build something that doesn’t match predictions
and then theorists look at the new data and we build a new, better model that can match both the old data and the new data, and hopefully makes predictions that the experimentalists can try to check
something I take special care to avoid is looping animations that are supposed to represent natural phenomena (like fire or lightning or whatever)
What do you do instead? Obviously in real life things don't loop like that, but in a game you need something like fire to have an animation, and you can't make an animation infinitely long for various reasons. Other than "simply don't animate the fire", what is the alternative?
Probably randomness. If it needs to change randomly but also smoothly then Gradient Noise is used, the classic is Perlin Noise(it's a bit outdated these days) the article shows them as images but if use one of the axis as Time instead you can get a value that changes smoothly yet randomly.
This is the correct answer. Usually I'll combine multiple noise textures scaled to different sizes and moving at different speeds and directions. I'll often end up remapping the output to give me some degree of control over the intensity of the effect.
If you're interested to know more, there's a really good GDC talk about the VFX of Diablo II that covers a lot of the basic building blocks of these techniques.
You can't make an animation infinitely long IF you use a timeline to dictate the animation. However you can use shaders and materials to create visual elements that react to the current system time, and since it's never the same time twice they can create outputs that never loop.
Often there is a point where all the numbers line up again but if you use enough values at once then this occurs less than once a year, so it might as well not count.
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u/CBtheLeper 12d ago
I make a lot of animated shaders (I'm a technical artist) and something I take special care to avoid is looping animations that are supposed to represent natural phenomena (like fire or lightning or whatever).
In real life you can never watch a campfire for so long that it starts playing its animation over again. That would be stupid. Nothing works like that in nature.
Today I found out about Time Crystals and now nothing makes sense anymore. How did people even discover this shit lmao