Coding Challenge #28: Metaballs

References:

Videos:

Related Coding Challenges:

Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction
00:46 What is an Isosurface?
01:33 Code! Working with Pixels
02:35 Make a simple Isosurface
02:58 How to make Metaballs?
04:36 Code! Create a Blob class
07:43 Make the Blob move around
09:03 Create an Array of Blobs
10:37 Color pixels using all the Blobs
12:19 Add more Blobs
13:07 Make the Blobs Rainbow colored
14:14 Example of Blob Tracking
15:12 Combine Blob Tracking with Metaballs
19:32 Making some adjustments
21:07 Other ways to Move these Metaballs
21:51 Fixing a Bug

Editing by Mathieu Blanchette
Animations by Jason Heglund
Music from Epidemic Sound

#computervision #blobdetection #loadpixels #pixelanalysis #objecttracking #metaballs #isosurfaces #processing

[kuskus_th]

"Those are some really beautiful meatballs" ~ Daniel Shiffman, 2016

[Smomid]

this guy blows my mind with his genius

[johnvonhorn]

Message from Mr Rogers, "you're the nicest guy in the neighborhood". Thanks so much for these great tutorials.

[bencebalaton]

The real question is: are PVectors stored in the MetaBalls?
Great tutorial as always!!

[gloverelaxis]

Thank you so much for your years of hard work, boundless enthusiasm, and clarity of thought and language. These videos are an absolute treasure; they are so much fun to watch and they're such an inspiration to get excited about math and coding.

[Shockszzbyyous]

I gave my metaballs gravity, and now it's kinda like a lavalamp, except there is no convection from up to down.

[azyfloof]

Oh man, I love all the Coding Train videos I've watched lately, but this one speaks to me :D
I remember coding metaball "screensavers" many years ago in QBASIC, and I remember the incredibly old and slow laptop I first tried in on. It had a 16 grey level LCD screen, and rendered a frame every few minutes or so :P Several months later and I had a faster colour laptop that could run it properly. Still slow, but fast enough to appreciate it.
This video brings it all back!

[janknoblich]

Mettballs actually means meatball in german :D
0:02

[nctrn]

i clicked on this because i thought it was meatballs, very disappointed

[angledcoathanger]

These videos are so incredible! It's great having visual feedback for so many of the challenges. Would you ever consider doing something audio or synthesis based? Maybe even using Pure Data?

[zdddddd]

I watched only 1 video of this guy and when I saw this video I already knew he will say meatball as soon as video starts. and thats it he said :D

[earthbjornnahkaimurrao]

17:20 - you have a funny way of finding the average.

[borekworek]

What's your favourite color?
Me: 13:58

[alijayameilio]

better to times the color with 255, because radius / distance will give perfect 1 on the radius of the circle

[soufianesalhi]

dude you make code such a fun, i wish if my programmation professor was like you ! thanks for the good videos and keep coding !

[tehsimo]

Infectious enthusiasm! pumped to go write a heat map visualisation from this

[its_ya_guy_the_big_bak_guai]

Daniel!! When are you going to show us the 3D Metaballs??

[dannorris]

Another great tutorial Daniel. I love the coding side of the videos but I also feel that this is a fantastic way to teach some of the tougher concepts in mathematics. I know the maths in this was fairly straightforward but in other videos, you've covered some quite complex topics. In this visual, high energy format though, it's so easy to follow.

Always lots of fun and great noises by the way...notably at 3:30 which is now my computer's error sound ;)

[joesharp]

I love these coding challenges. Great work Daniel

[xnick_uy]

Pretty funny video.
One thing I would like to try sometime is to merge the metaballs with the original frames from the camera instead of just replacing the pixels. Probably the pixel[index] should be set to some average value in HSV space.