When moving in real three-dimensional space as a human being, walking in the woods and picking mushrooms involves a lot of input of visual patterns, depending on the season and region, usually dry leaves on the ground and lots of branches, small plants and soil. Contrary to the romantic idea of a walk in the woods as a wellness trip to get away from working in an office in front of a computer screen, it can be a very similar experience. From an artistic, research perspective (of course, I am not questioning the actual health benefits of being outside and looking around the forest, even if it means looking mainly at the ground). Similar in the sense of fatigue and repetition of patterns over a long period of time. For this sculptural work, I have created a computer graphics tool that can generate my own mushroom colonies. These fruiting bodies, of which I can now digitally create endless variations, are loosely based on any species of mushroom that needs wood as a feeding ground.
While I took a lot of inspiration from different types of these mushroom flushes, I wanted this system to be relatively simple in its function to track how attributes such as food, water, weather, and anything that can influence a specific growth behaviour of a mushroom patch. This approach is very cumbersome, and in most commercial asset creation pipelines it would probably be replaced by simply scanning or capturing a set of mushroom fruiting bodies and scattering them on surfaces, as this is easy to do, and after a certain initial group size and amount of scattering and randomness it usually looks very realistic very quickly. Since I got bored with randomness very quickly, I started replacing these steps with noise patterns, which come from people interpreting natural algorithms for computer graphics, and this gives a person creating a digital tool like this a lot more control over the behaviour of where things should appear in 3D space (position), where they should go (direction), and what rules they need to follow to create a certain shape over and over again, with the same rules influencing that shape, but never having an exact replica, but always a unique fragment of a larger, possibly infinite, phenomenon.
While I took a lot of inspiration from different types of these mushroom flushes, I wanted this system to be relatively simple in its function to track how attributes such as food, water, weather, and anything that can influence a specific growth behaviour of a mushroom patch. This approach is very cumbersome, and in most commercial asset creation pipelines it would probably be replaced by simply scanning or capturing a set of mushroom fruiting bodies and scattering them on surfaces, as this is easy to do, and after a certain initial group size and amount of scattering and randomness it usually looks very realistic very quickly. Since I got bored with randomness very quickly, I started replacing these steps with noise patterns, which come from people interpreting natural algorithms for computer graphics, and this gives a person creating a digital tool like this a lot more control over the behaviour of where things should appear in 3D space (position), where they should go (direction), and what rules they need to follow to create a certain shape over and over again, with the same rules influencing that shape, but never having an exact replica, but always a unique fragment of a larger, possibly infinite, phenomenon.
