Particle Dreams — Karl Sims's early animation

1988

Artists: Karl Sims · Year: 1988 · Medium: Computer-animated short — procedurally-generated particle systems producing organic-looking motion · Substrate: Custom particle-simulation software; rendered on MIT Media Lab workstations and film-out equipment · Place: Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA · Institution: MIT Media Lab; Thinking Machines Corporation (subsequent) Karl Sims's Particle Dreams (1988) is a six-minute computer-animated film produced during Sims's graduate work at the MIT Media Lab, in which hundreds of thousands of individual particles — each with its own position, velocity, color, and interaction rules — were simulated in real space and rendered frame by frame to produce dense, evolving, physically-behaving compositions of light, water, smoke, and swarm. The film is a series of vignettes: a humanoid figure made of water dissolves; a dancer's body erupts into sparks; particles settle into drifting snow. Sims had come to MIT from MIT (BS, Life Sciences, 1984) after two years working at Whitney/Demos Productions on early commercial computer animation. His innovation in Particle Dreams was to let the particles behave — to specify physics (gravity, velocity, collision, turbulence) and let the resulting motion emerge from the simulation rather than keyframing each frame by hand. The film was rendered on a Connection Machine CM-2 at Thinking Machines Corporation, where Sims had a research affiliation; the CM-2's 64,000 parallel processors were uniquely suited to simulating many independent particles simultaneously. What makes the film matter is less the technical achievement than the argument that emerged from it. Sims's subsequent work — Genetic Images (1993), which genetically evolved abstract compositions through user selection; Evolved Virtual Creatures (1994), which evolved walking, swimming, and jumping virtual morphologies through genetic algorithms; Galápagos (1997), a gallery installation that let visitors evolve creatures in real time — all follow the same organizing principle: the artist specifies the rules of a generative system and then lets the system run, with emergent behavior doing the compositional work. Particle Dreams is the earliest film-length execution of that premise in computer animation. It was shown at Ars Electronica in 1989, where it won the Golden Nica in the computer-animation category. It is a direct antecedent of every subsequent particle-system-based film and real-time effect: the water simulations of Pixar's later films, the dust-and-smoke effects that became ubiquitous in 1990s Hollywood, and the particle-system vocabularies of every modern 3D graphics engine. Sims remains at his Cambridge, MA studio, running GenArts (founded 1996, which produced the Sapphire effects plugins for film post-production) and continuing research into generative simulation. Lore Sims's CM-2 access at Thinking Machines was an unusual arrangement: Danny Hillis, the CM-2's architect, had personally offered it to Sims as a research collaboration, on the understanding that Sims would stress-test the machine's parallel-rendering capabilities. The 1988 film took several months of intermittent CM-2 time to render — each frame at full resolution took several minutes to compute, multiplied by roughly 10,000 frames for a six-minute film. Sims slept in the Thinking Machines offices during the final rendering run. The Connection Machine itself is now a sculptural object at the Computer History Museum; its distinctive black cube with red LEDs has become a museum piece. Sims's original FORTRAN code for the Particle Dreams particle-system has never been publicly released. Sources • Sims, Karl — "Particle Animation and Rendering Using Data Parallel Computation" (SIGGRAPH 1990). • Ars Electronica Archive — 1989 Golden Nica citation. • Sims, Karl — karlsims.com (artist website and videos).