Brilliant idea time:

Inspired by @TrojanMorse and his fractal trees

A fractal tree wallpaper that grows throughout the day.

So at 12 a script starts a new fractal and only uses depth 1 (a twig). Then every other hour it branches once more so at 2 am the fractal would have depth 2 and at noon it would have depth 7. That way you get a tree growing throughout the day for your screensaver. Now to make this a thing

@TrojanMorse idk if it pings you in the post

this is truly brilliant
u need a prize or something

@Orni i love this idea, we should consider making and looking into this as a project. I always wanted to see what goes into it like the live screen savers app on steam. Maybe even use theirs and see if we can do things based off time and not have to reinvent things

I wanted to make something similar, but using Perlin noise (and others) instead. Every second it would re-generate the image with slightly tweaked values and redraw (or blend over the previous frame). This would generate clouds that would billow and blow/stretch/fade throughout the day.

I tried making good storm clouds, but was never satisfied with the results.

I also wanted a nice scene with photos taken every 15 minutes and update my wallpaper throughout the day with the sun. So easy to do if you have the images. Never found anything good though!

I am going to investigate this and if it seems like a fun thing to look into. Ill start a project and mayne we can collab or who ever wants to be involved :) i am on this Math high at the moment 🙈

@TrojanMorse I was just going to do it with a cron/eventmanager thing, but a live wallpaper would look pretty sick

@Root im working on a perlin noise generated land for the scene in which the new instances of trees will grow against. Eventually it would have animated through life and have leavea and drop seeds and die and a new tree grow amd all of this could all work well together

@Root Volumetric clouds are notoriously hard to make (especially make them look nice)

@Orni They are, but it's a wonderful challenge (:

I've gotten some really nice results, but only for cirrus / cumulus clouds. Never for cumulonimbus (at least up close; the overall shape is so much easier) or altostratus (aka overcast). The latter is unexpectedly hard to do well because it really really needs detail (lest it be a boring gray blur), but not too much or it looks so wrong.

The fancier cloud types can be easier/harder, depending, but those are usually just different shapes. The hardest part was always getting the stormy clouds to move and evolve properly, since there's just so much variation, and i soo don't want to model all of that. ugh.

kind of got carried away, sorry. i love clouds.

tl;dr: making pretty-looking clouds is much easier than MAKING THE DAMN THINGS MOVE RIGHT.

@Root clouds are wonderful.

Also storm clouds would be brutal to model nicely, given there are supercomputers used to try to model a developing storm cloud to see how dangerous it's going to be. Fluid dynamics with a whole lot of physics is definitely not easy to estimate.

don't use screensavers, waste of energy 😭

@raldo94 shit I didn't mean screensaver. I meant desktop background. Although either would work

That sounds so nice. +1