Tiny Patterns

I made a interactive pattern generator in Processing. Aspects of the pattern are controlled by moving the scrubs around the outside of the circle. It should be capable of generating over 4 billion unique patterns (some nicer than others). Here are a couple screen shots of it in action:

The patterns it produces tend to be quite intricate. You might need to look up close at your screen in order to really appreciate each pattern (not recommended with CRT's). These following images are the direct output from the program (click to see there full size (which actually isn't a whole lot bigger)).

Continue reading to see many more.

Paper Dome

I found a great project that an aspiring architect had made. They created a certain pattern in Rhino and then had that pattern cut out via a laser cutter. They then turned the cut 2D pattern into a 3D structure by placing a support rod in its center. The result was an inspiring and beautiful creation.

I decided to take on the task of creating one of these structures for myself. The main difference is that they had literally thousands of dollars worth of program and equipment at their disposal and I did not.

So my first step was to create the pattern in a printable format. In a few hours I wrote a program that generates the pattern based on a few customizable variables and exports it to PDF for easy printing. I wrote the program in Processing so this part was completely free. I made a few variations of the pattern and took them over to the print shop. I printed $0.90 worth of copies. Then I choose one I liked the most and spent about a half hour cutting each line by hand with a razor knife.

Here is the pattern I went with (it's scaled down a bit and saved as a PNG because Blogger won't let me post the PDF):

I found some cardboard, tape, and a nail that I already had around the house. Here are my final results:

For a total materials cost cost of under a dollar, and using a program I wrote myself, I'm pretty happy with the results. No question a laser cuter would create a more perfect structure though. The small deviations in the cuts by hand lead to uneven tension in the top of the dome. However, the individual dome you see here has an out of pocket cost of 15 cents. All and all, this was a fun experiment and I am quite happy with the results.

waves and ripples

    Here are some screenshots and video capture of a Processing sketch I made to show wave motion on a plane in 3D. This sketch is a lot of fun to mess with and it produces some really amazing looking results.

    Unfortunately neither the images or video show the beauty of watching these run at full speed in their native environment. The video is not good at all. I haven't found a nice way to capture video on my computer yet, the files are huge, the quality is poor, and the worst part is that doing the capture bogs down my computer making the sketch run abnormally slow and choppy. At least you can get a sense of what the motion looks like though. The images, while free of these issues, just don't capture the beauty of watching the plane freely wave and ripple. I think that, despite the limitations, these images and videos are still pretty awesome though and I hope you enjoy them.

Note: I forgot to turn off the [non-working] sound when doing the screen capture. Thats why the video has those crazy sounds.

This is a basic sign wave propagating from the center pf the plane.

From straight above:

and from other perspectives:

music visualization

A short low quality screen capture video of a music visualization I made in Processing. Unfortunately there is also no audio but the sketch in the video was reacting to the music playing at the time. This visualization built off work I've been doing with manipulating a grid of points in 3D. I will probably post more on that later.

Pattern Interference

Here are some interference patterns made from various manipulations on two overlaid point grids. Created with Processing.

More Intermediate Beauty

    Programming is an art and a science. Like most things in life, the fun is in the journey.
    Here I was working on creating my own noise generation algorithm. I had hoped to make something like Perlin noise. I wanted to take a shot at it before studying how others (including Ken Perlin) approached it. After making these I decided I better start studying. So far I've come to realize Perlin pretty much made his algorithms to avoid the approach I took (for really good reason). Still, I made some pretty pictures.

 

These were just a couple of screenshots from another project, I thought they looked awesome though.

Angle Reference Circle in Processing

When I think back to trig, I seam to remember 0 degrees always being horizontal and to the right of the center. That turns out to be pretty arbitrary. Different programming languages tend to have different ideas about what angle is considered 0. It's not a problem, just something you need to know in order to get the angels your expecting. The following image is of a sketch I made in Processing to show what it considers 0. Turns out it's down and vertical. I went ahead and made the whole circle with some tick marks for practice. The labels show the angle in both degrees and radians. The lines in the center are random, the numbers on them just show the order in which they were created. The code to create them later served as the base for the branches in the random recursion tree from my last post.

I made a screen shot and used it as a reference to help visualize angles while programming but without the overhead of having a Processing sketch running. Perhaps it could be useful to someone else as well. If someone wants a cleaner version without the center lines, let me know and i will add it. Or just make your own. Here is the code I used, simplified a bit though so it just draws the main circle with tick marks and labels but does not put those random lines in the center.