A Bauhaus style poster.

read more...

One line… that repeatedly splits, albeit without (mostly) crossing itself.

Fractal trees GO!

• splitChance controls how quickly the line branches
• minChildren / maxChildren controls branching
• angleRange is how many radians the new branches can change by
• randomizeAngles controls if child angles are random/evenly spaced
• spacing is roughly how spread out the tree is
• pauseOnResetFor / stopOnReset controls what happens when a tree is done
• colorMode changes drawing colors
• anchor changes where the tree starts

It does get a bit sluggish, especially if you have a high number of children.

read more...

I’m… not really sure where I was going with this one. 😄

Basically, 16x16 tiny sketches that slide around like a sliding block puzzle. Although with how chaotic some of the simulations are, it’s not always easy to see.

read more...

I feel like the most unexpected of paths is Langton’s Ant!.

Okay, it’s fairly expected. And I’ve even done it before. Been a while though.

Anyways, here we go!

In a nutshell, you have a grid with N possible values (the length of the rule string). For each pattern, when the ‘ant’ walks on that cell, the value in incremented by one and you will turn according to these rules:

• R turn right (90° or 60° in hex)
• L turn left (same)
• S turn right 120° in hex mode (nothing in square)
• M turn left 120° in hex mode
• U turn 180° in hex mode
• anything else (N above), do nothing/go straight

This ends up with some really interesting behavior for such a short ruleset. Langton’s Ant (LR, the default) is definitely an interesting one. For 10,000 ticks, you get chaotic behavior… and then suddenly it stabilizes!

read more...

Wallpaper group. There are only 17 ways to cover a plane with a repeating pattern, choose your favourite on this page: Wallpaper group

This is a great article about Classifying Symmetries that says there are actually 35 tiling patterns!

List of planar symmetry groups is another Wikipedia page with a good summary of the wallpaper group.

I spent waaaaay too long on this one.

• group is the 17 groups mentioned
• subGroup is horizontal or vertical for some of the above
• cellType is the shape of each cell
• cellStyle is what to fill them with
• debugDrawOne shows what one tile looks like
• debugDisplay prints what random values were selected
• pauseBuffer is useful for pausing the generation (although if any of the others are random they will keep changing)

Not all of the groups and cell types are perfectly compatible. In fact, probably half or more aren’t. But they still produce something, and I think that’s pretty cool!

read more...

Order vs Disorder

So I have two kinds of agents: Order, which always moves in straight lines and Chaos which… doesn’t!

Settings:

• updateRate is how fast it runs
• minAgentCount will spawn agents until you reach this number
• maxAgentCount will kill off agents until you’re under this number
• dieOfOldAge will kill off old agents
• maxAge is the longest an agent can last
• agentRatio of 0 is all order and 1 is all chaos
• spawnRate is how often an agent will spawn a new agent (of the same kind)
• resetPercent is how much of the screen can be full before resetting
• pauseOnReset will pause on a reset to allow downloading! (change any setting include this one to unpause)

read more...

Create an invisible object where only the shadows can be seen.

Noise that pushes a bunch of particles around on the screen. There is 1 (or more) ‘shadows’ on the screen that push the dust away.

If the shadow runs off the screen it will come back in a bit from the opposite edge.

Settings:

• dustCount is how much dust
• dustSpeed is a multiplier for how fast the dust goes per frame
• dustDieOff is how much dust disappears each frame
• onlyEdgeDust sets dust to only spawn on the edges, rather than anywhere (has some weird visual artifacts when the dust is a nearly horizontal / vertical)
• rainbowDust makes the dust far more colorful
• windScale is the scale of the noise, 1 will wiggle a lot more, 5 is closer to straight lines and slow changes
• fade will leave trails by fading the screen; turning this off is interesting since the shadow will be much more subtle
• shadowCount is how many shadows there are
• shadowForce is how strongly they repel dust
• shadowWindIndependent means the shadow doesn’t always move with the particles
• shadowEdge will show where the shadow shape actually is
• shadowsMove will allow the shadows to move / stop them

read more...

14) Fits Perfectly

Basically, we’ll pack as many circles in as we can!

• retriesPerFrame is how many circles it will try to place before giving up and drawing the frame
• minDiameter is the smallest a circle can be (this should be 1 for a ‘perfect fit’)
• maxDiameter is the largest one can be
• spacing is how much space to leave between circles (this should be 0 a ‘perfect fit’)
• borders will draw a black border on each circle
• fillInside will place circles inside of each other as well as outside, so long as there is still enough spacing
• blackPercent is how many of the circles will be black rather than bright colors

read more...

13) Self Portrait

That was surprisingly fun.

Basically, it will take recursively divide the picture over time. Each time, it will find the node with the largest error (real image color compared to the current random color) and split it in 4, assigning each to the nearest random color from our palette.

• colors controls how many maximum (random) colors will be chosen
• edges will draw the boxes of the tree
• minimumBlock is the size at which it won’t split any more
• resetAfter will generate new colors even this many frames
• evenSplit will split each box into exactly 4; if this is off, each axis will randomly be 25-75%
• weightErrorBySize will split small boxes earlier; with this off, larger boxes have more error because they are larger

If you don’t want to look at me any more, turning off selfPortraitMode will load an image from picsum.dev.

read more...

12) Boxes

It’s like draw a box. But somehow even more. And automatic.

If you let it run for a while, you get some crazy abstract art!

read more...