Fluid

Fluid screenshotThanks to its integration of Open GL and Quartz graphics technology, there are a number of excellent screensavers available for Mac OS X.

Panther ships with Flurry as it’s default screensaver, which is beauty to behold, and there is also Fireflies, another excellent OpenGL screensaver. However, I recently installed Fluid, a project from Concept House, and have been hugely impressed ó

Fluid isn’t just any screensaver. It is a realtime fluid-dynamics model that renders to your screen using wave velocity color-coding and reflections on the surface of the waves. Fluid also has its own particle engine so that it can visualize particles within the liquid medium. Add to that the ability to show the streaklines of the currents and you’ve got yourself one really intense screensaver.

The screensaver has plenty of built-in themes and a huge number of settings, so you can end up creating your own custom theme. My favourite so far is the Van Gogh Starry Night theme (pictured inset).

Posted 6 years, 6 months ago

Red Pill is good too. :)

http://meta.ath0.com/software/redpill/

BTW, here’s the official Flurry page. It’s available for Mac OS X (of course) and Windows.

http://homepage.mac.com/calumr/flurry.html

Tommy · www · 6 years, 6 months ago

Is there any sample code that shows how to do the warping effects like Fluid does? I somehow doubt the source code would be forthcoming from the authors, but one can always hope (even for just a sample of the warping engine). I would imagine that it’s either some kind of NURBS surface that’s overlayed over the image, or I have no clue how it’s done (time to pull out classdump and otool...)

Anybody know?

Jim

Jim Witte · www · 6 years, 1 month ago