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As I was playing with point cloud, I realize that I would much prefer it if it felt "solid." The concept is really cool, but the graphics themselves feel a little too spare.
I wonder if it would be easy to combine that effect with the heightfield effect.
1) Get average brightness, as with the point cloud.
2) Reduce the grid size substantially, to something like 100x100, or less. (Maybe more w/
3) Calculate avg brightness inside of each cell in the grid.
4) Instead of a cloud of points, show a solid field of square columns in a grid, where each column would be the height of the brightness of the underlying image.
- Camera control options to pan, zoom, etc.
- Sliders to change the grid size, color, hue, saturation, etc.
- Maybe an option to map the "average" color of the underlying image to the column, to allow it to come through as color.
** Extra credit: Allow each "field" to have two image inputs: a black/white height map, and a colored texture map. This is a very familiar concept to video game terrain designs, and could be really powerful. Would allow really detailed world-building without any clever programming on my part.
- alt column shapes (circular, circular w/ hemisphere tops, hexagonal, triangular, ovoid, FLS mango shaped)
- option: Give the option to just map the "tops" of each column, leaving the space below empty/invisible. This would allow us to do cool 3-d effects like objects flying over a scene, just by mapping a graphic of birds flying and adjusting brightness/height as desired. Or could do layers of crossing 3-D traffic like the scenes in 5th Element or the opening scene in Star Wars Episode II.
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Most of this felt like just mashing two effects together, but I think it would be a powerful extension of the point cloud concept, which I think has lots of creative potential.
If the grid is low-res, you could easily create a "minecraft" style world with this.
If the grid could be higher res (constrained by computer power, maybe,) it could make some really intricate scenes with just a few graphic asset layers