Amberlight

Shapes Peter Blaškovic turns his hand to something more surreal

Following the success of Flame Painter, Peter Blaškovic turns his hand to something more surreal – yet equally versatile.

Escape Motions – aka Slovakian developer Peter Blaškovic – first caught our attention with Flame Painter, a fairly simple tool for creating realistic, procedurally generated flames.

His latest program, Amberlight, pulls a similar feat, using some undoubtedly complex algorithms to create objects. To be honest, we’re not sure what kind of objects Amberlight creates, but this is part of the attraction – they can be whatever you want them to be. Fire it up and you’re given a blank canvas with up to 12 movable points, and an ongoing animation as they do their thing and make, well, things. You can adjust their force, intensity and cut-off using slidable axis, and you can tweak colours.

You can pause the program while it’s building the image, so you can get it at just the right moment, but we’d love to see a rewind button so you can go back to earlier renders.

Amberlight is easy to use and the results look amazing and organic right from the word go. We’re not sure if it’s for everyone, but it’s pretty cheap and you can download a demo from Escape Motions if you want to see how it works first.

To begin with, images exhibit a grainy texture, which is smoothed out as they’re rendered. But pretty soon they become smooth and fluid, and it’s fascinating to watch them grow.

While Amberlight’s fractals look random, you’ve actually got a lot of control over how it works.