Procedurally generated video of stars and clouds moving using a parallax effect.

This video actually consists of multiple pieces of procedurally generated art combined together. These individual parts are the star and cloud textures, the code that animates them and the Bézier curve gradients that add colour.

I created this art as a part of Spaceships, a free/libre video game that I created. The game and this art are created in the Rust programming language and using the glium crate for rendering the video (this is a safe abstraction to OpenGL).

Each individual star texture is generated from four glowing lines that intersect the centre of the texture. I was inspired by GIMP's sparkle plugin on individual pixels when making this.

The clouds are generated using Perlin noise in a similar way to how this article generates them. The video uses three cloud images layered on top of each other.

The larger game that this is part of is 2D, but the sky background is 3D, with each individual star and cloud image having a z coordinate that gives a parallax effect when the camera moves.

What I have described so far would only generate a greyscale video. For the clouds, what adds colour are two Bézier curve gradients. Each of the two colour channels in each cloud image is treated as input to the Bézier curve which outputs an RGB colour. Once the clouds are rendered, the stars are rendered on top and coloured based on the colour of the generated clouds right under it.

Here are the source files that are used to generate this video. These only provide a partial picture as they depend on many other source files, but if you want to get an understanding of how the code works, these are a good place to start exploring.

1. Star texture generation code: https://codeberg.org/rustydev/spaceships/src/tag/v1.3.1/assets/src/textures/stars.rs
2. Cloud texture generation code: https://codeberg.org/rustydev/spaceships/src/tag/v1.3.1/assets/src/textures/clouds.rs
3. Animation: https://codeberg.org/rustydev/spaceships/src/tag/v1.3.1/src/playing/view/decorations/sky.rs
4. Gradient: https://codeberg.org/rustydev/spaceships/src/tag/v1.3.1/src/game/config.rs#L113-L119

Video description:

A prototype of the project of virtual breeding of digital plants by crossing. Each plant has a genome, which is an array of numbers. By crossing plants (mixing their genome), we get a new kind of plant. In this way, you can get very interesting and unusual results.

Summary generated by claude.ai from the video transcript:

A generative art project to create abstract images of imaginary plants. The creator starts with a genome represented as a sequence of numbers that gets fed into an algorithm to generate plant images. By evolving the genomes through processes like mutation and crossover, new plant images emerge. The creator discusses the challenges of defining an objective fitness function, since beauty is subjective. Without a fitness function for natural selection, the creator resorts to artificial selection by manually choosing genomes to crossover. The resulting plants have unique, imaginary qualities that can't be precisely predicted in advance. The creator notes some possible rules to make the plants more unique, like limiting how similar parent genomes can be. Overall, the project aims to explore an abstract generative space of imaginary plants through evolutionary techniques.

Generative art inspired by works of Loek Vugs. You can generate more variations and explore the code on this Observable notebook.