[dahart]

Why should the fields be realistic looking? I guess this is one of the dangers of presenting working interactive illustrations and tutorials for generative art; it lets people look behind the curtain and identify the illusion, and you lose the magic of the finished artwork. The artist was careful and deliberate in their final examples to not crank down the smoothing enough to see horizontal lines. Simulated fluid flow wouldn’t be able to easily produce any of the first three images in the article very easily, if at all, and people doing simulated fluid flows still frequently inject turbulence (ad hoc noise) anyway in order to give it texture.