rockabit » generative art

Iris getting somewhere

admin — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 21:10:40 +0000

My most recent iris rendering:

An iris is a beautiful thing

admin — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 15:05:01 +0000

For a while now I have wanted to render out an iris in code alone, so I have now finally started experimenting in that direction.

I must say I am not unhappy with the results sofar, especially since I have stumbled onto some nice byproducts along the way

L-system animation

admin — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 15:29:34 +0000

A long while ago I wrote a small Flex application to draw L-systems (post).
With this app I noticed how cool it is to play around with drawing angles by moving the slider (post #2).

But somehow, I never thought of adding a play button to the slider so it plays it as an animation.
So now I did. Well, no play button, but just an animation. Here it is. Please enjoy.

lsystem animator

Note: after clicking once, you can use the + and – keys to speed it up or slow it down

Fractal spirograph

admin — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 07:51:25 +0000

These patterns I made with the l-system application from the previous post, just by experimenting with one rule and changing the angle of rotation! The rule was F -> F+F-F+F and apparently it gives a lot of spirograph-like effects. I also really like the last one, it looks like the pink panther (including the body)

As always, click the images to see them at full size.

Interactive Morphogenesis to Rumania

admin — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 11:35:35 +0000

The Interactive Morphogenesis project, which I made a while ago with Rick Companje and Irad Lee, has been accepted for the Areas of Conlu(x)ence conference in Rumania.

Areas of conflu(x)ence proposes an international debate on the relationship between art and technology in the present digital era, focusing on the impact of the new media in our lives.

The project has to do with l-systems, which are mostly used to model plant growth. As Wikipedia puts it:

An L-system or Lindenmayer system is a formal grammar (a set of rules and symbols) most famously used to model the growth processes of plant development, but also able to model the morphology of a variety of organisms. L-systems can also be used to generate self-similar fractals such as iterated function systems.

To explain it in a bit more detail: take a string, say “F” and define a rule saying how this “F” changes, for example “F->F+F-F”. This has the effect that you can iterate over the string, each time replacing each “F” with “F+F-F”. After three iterations the string would have become “F+F-F+F+F-F-F+F-F+F+F-F+F+F-F-F+F-F-F+F-F+F+F-F-F+F-F”. Now imagine these different characters to represent drawing commands, where in this case F means draw a line in the current direction and + and – mean turn left or right by, say, 45 degrees. These few simple rules can lead to very complex and very beautiful structures being drawn, such as the famous Koch Curve, which is not exactly plant-shaped but does convey the complexity and beauty hidden within the simple grammar of l-systems:

We used this grammar to create a generative art piece which uses sound input to generate an l-system, visualize it, and convert it to sound output as well. We also customized it a bit to make it 3D and we let it move to environmental sounds as well. There’s an active demo where you can simulate the influence of sound by moving you mouse cursor to make the shape move. Also be sure to check out the website