Tao Maelstrom and Plastic Vortex

I recently posted some Tao vortex videos on my Instagram (trapcode_lab) and got many questions on how it was made. 

Here's a quick explanation of setting it up:

To make the Plastic Vortex, the Material color was changed to Orange. IBL was setup with the "Dark Industrual" environment (very high Diffuse, like 1000 to get some diffuse from it). Here is the final video:

And here is the AE project file for it: Tao_Plastic_Vortex_CC12.aep

To make the "Tao Maelstrom" effect the Fractal settings were changed to use the positive side (positive Amplitude) of the MultiSmoothRidge fractal. Also the different Fractal>Individual Freq were changed. And a texture was used to create the lines on the surface. Here is the final video:

Here is the AE project file: Tao_Maelstrom_CC12.aep

Depth of Field was added using AE's built-in Camera Lens Blur effect. A quick blur map was created using a shape layer with a Fill Gradient. Note that Lens Blur has a "Blur Focal Distance" that selects where in the gradient the focus is.

Vortex.A - generative art for iPad / iPhone / iPod

Vortex.A - touch-interactive generative art. I am experimenting with fluid dynamics: how liquids and gases behave - a classically difficult problem in physics/maths. Most agree that fluid dynamics is described by the Navier-Stokes differential equations. There is no known all-case solution for the equations, but there are solutions for specific cases and approximative methods to find numerical solutions.

I'm experimenting with my own approach and it is making some pretty promising animations. This app visualizes the flow by emitting particles where you touch the screen (multi-touch works) and the fluid itself is also affected by touch. The lines are so called "pathlines" that trace the particles' paths over time.

I'm polishing the technology and hoping to bring it to VFX/motion graphics artists as a tool for fluid dynamics animations in the future.

The price is 99 cents and it's available in AppStore.

Check out CreativeApplications.net's article, contains video! Or proceed to view video on Vimeo. Or, if you have flash, check out the video below (note that this video is from iPhone, on iPad it looks different)