bhaprayan

Thanks! Glad to hear it was fun and that you loved that line. Thought it would be the simplest way to describe the underlying concept. Did you have any elements / challenges in mind that may be fun?

I was primarily thinking about more sources, obstacles, and sinks. Right now the solver picks a random solution so it may be interesting to optionally make that deterministic too.

Understanding intent is really hard indeed. What’s helpful about constraining it to you showing the effect is if you are able to do it, there exists at least one possible mechanism.

Thanks, happy to hear you liked it!

Really neat demo! I skimmed through the paper and it looks like they’re using a precomputed database to find an assembly that matches the motion (presumably as a seed to instantiate the solver). That’s definitely more efficient than what I have right now (though perhaps less versatile). I like that they manufactured a few of the characters using 3D printing! That was definitely on my mind, really happy to see they did it.

Some of the mechanisms (belt drives etc) might be a little tricky with 3D printers, but would be very cool to see the mechanism tangibly realized.

Haha it sort of came out before I was born, otherwise I definitely would have! I think I'll take a leaf out of their book and expose a mode to make the simulation deterministic. I'm using a PRNG right now to make the mechanism selection more "creative", but I could see determinism being an interesting experience.

Thanks, appreciate it!

Embarrassed I'm just finding out about this, very cool! Neat that they simulated air pressure too. I should try that, would be fun to influence the texture of the sound.

Thanks! Great idea, I hadn’t realized the interaction is binary. It would be cool to allow for "continuous" inputs too. The world would have to account for interactions over a recording period right.

Behind the scenes, I’ve tried to make the audio production realistic, so there’s some acoustic modeling going on (eg echoes, attenuation of sound, etc). But yes you could imagine having the input forces be continuous and having the mechanism trying to figure out how to reproduce the sound exactly.