Processing & Generative Art

I follow a number of people on Twitter who make generative art, and it's something I've been wanting to try myself for a while. With everything going on I finally made the time to sit down and really play with a tool called Processing.

One of my favorite generative artists, Anders Hoff of Inconvergent, does some amazing work with plotters. My favorite piece of his is 706dbb4. I love the way the intersecting lines form a sphere, and the lines that break out of the confines of the circle are almost solar flares.

I wanted to attempt to generate a piece inspired by this print, and wanted to create something that could be drawn on a pen plotter.

I started off by connecting random vertices on the edge of a circle to one another, creating a random web of lines. Eventually I added a limit to the angles in which the vertices could be, which adds a more abstract character. After adding randomization to all of the parameters, I just kept rendering new images.

With some advice from Andrew Rodgers on Twitter to play with more advanced math functions like sine, cosine, exponents, etc. This came right as I was playing with using Bezier paths instead of straight lines. I created another set of vertices and modified their positions:

anchorPoint = pointOnCircle(center, center, circleRadius + 100, tan(r))
anchor1X = random(0, canvasSize)
anchor1Y = anchorPoint[1]

ancho2X = anchorPoint[1]
anchor2Y = pow(log(anchorPoint[0]), 3)

The blue and green squares are the anchors that Bezier paths move through, each with a start and end point on the circle:

The new images are much more energetic, and when the angles are small produce an internal flare of lines, as seen in the third image below.

All of the images (and possibly more, over time) are available over in the new Generative Art gallery. I hope this will be a fun new area to explore over time.