Technique · Fields
Droplets
Glassy liquid domes with lens glow, dark rims, highlights and contact shadows.
Droplets is a field drawn for every pixel by the graphics chip. Every piece on Synapse Drip is made from a recipe that layers techniques like this one, and you can change any of it in the Studio.
Good to know
- A raindrop on a window is a lens: focus a camera on it and the whole room appears, upside down, inside the drop.
- Dew forms when a surface cools below the dew point and water vapour condenses faster than it evaporates.
- The shape of a small drop on a surface is set by its contact angle, the angle where the water meets the surface, not by gravity.
- A water drop on glass is a real lens: it shows a small, upside-down image of whatever is behind it.
- Surface tension pulls a drop toward the shape with the least surface for its volume, which is why small drops are almost perfect spheres.
The mathematics
- A full ball of water, with a refractive index of about 1.33, focuses light roughly two radii from its centre.
- Snell's law, n1 sin(a1) = n2 sin(a2), is what bends the scene behind each dome; here the lookup is bent in proportion to the dome's slope, with a strength of 0.80.
In art
- Photographers spray glycerine and water on glass to make beads that last, because plain water evaporates under hot lamps.
- A drop is the smallest scene in painting: still-life painters of the seventeenth century showed off by putting a perfect highlight on a bead of water.
Related techniques
Nebula and stars · Liquid · Network · Terrain and maps · Neuron · Order to chaos · Fractal tree · Radiolarian shell