Invisible Ink

Been working on a new art machine for the last few months. So far output is pretty flexible.  Right now I’m looking into doing these as archival quality, high resolutions prints. Stay tuned!

Here’s are some tests for another art machine I’ve been working on. Looking to incorporate it into a larger toolbox for print output.

Here’s are some tests for another art machine I’ve been working on. Looking to incorporate it into a larger toolbox for print output.

Here’s are some tests for a new art machine I’ve been working on. Looking to incorporate it into a larger toolbox for print output.

In order to really give Perlin Noise the role it deserves in some generative art output, I built an interactive toy to help me visualize some of it’s graphical possibilities. I plot a ring of particles around a circle using AS3 Point.Polar(len,angle). The length for each particle on the circle is determined by reading Uints from the BitmapData.getVector() method. Angle just comes from dividing Math.PI*2 by the number of particles. The resulting visualization has a lot of parameters to play with: Number of particles, ring radius, etc. Until I add gravity and wind sliders, the “Random motion X” and “Random motion Y” parameters are Brownian motion wind and gravity respectively. Try playing with the Octaves to vary the shape from a smooth circle to higher frequency shapes. Fractal noise will also smooth out higher frequencies. By activating trails, you can draw the animation to the canvas. Once again, the Blendmodes menu produces some exciting results. The SUBTRACT blend mode looks like solar flares. One thing I don’t like is that because I’m reading a strip of Perlin Noise from left to right, when I get to the end of the strip and start over, there is often a “jump” rather than a smooth transition between values. When rendering at lower octaves, you’ll notices a “jag” mid way on the right side of the ring. What I think I need to get rid of this is a smooth wrap in the Perlin Noise. However, I’m not sure how to achieve this (stitch=true doesn’t get rid of it). Any suggestions would be great.

Perlin Noise Polar Coordinate Visualizer

Here’s another interactive experiment, this time using Perlin Noise (the cloudy swatch in the top left corner of the Flash movie). By playing around with the user interface controls, you can generate a surprising variety of terrain. The “blend modes” drop down menu on the right side is especially cool. Give it s try, it’s addictive.

Periln Noise Terrain Toy

Here are a couple more experiments, this time using different code: Concentric rings of particles, whose velocities are determined by values from a Perlin Noise map. Wind, gravity and friction are applied. Then lines are drawn between the particles with the drawing API, outlines and fills applied. Definitely want to build this one out into an interactive toy as well.

Perlin Landscape

Perlin Landscape

Lately I’ve been fascinated with the idea of using colour values tell particles how to move across the surface of an image. So on and off, over the last couple months, I’ve been tinkering with a “force map toy” so I can control these particle systems in real time and save the resulting images. I ended up using a high resolution version of this engine for my Writtenimages.net project submission. There are many things I still want to add to it (saving settings with the image file, high resolution output, custom brushes, blur filter, matrix transformations, etc.) but I figured I’d release it “as is” so people can play with it. You can upload your own images, tinker with the settings and save the results. So give it a try and let me know what you’d like to see in version two.

Force Map Toy

Building the toy with ActionScript 3: I created the force map by running two convolution filters over an image to generate two gradient ramps (red and green) for the x & y axis, then fed this data to a particle system to control velocity, angle of acceleration and scale. I also added a bunch of other parameters: brush shape and size, friction, alpha and fading the bitmapData with a colorTransform object.
Here are some of the effects you can achieve with these settings:

Here is a a series of ActionScript experiments I did using two different engines: Animated Voronoi tessellations and Fermat spirals. The first piece in this post ended up being used by our Ontario Science Centre International Sales department for a business card design.

This time I’m replacing the source image used by the subdividing algorithm with appropriate colour values from a substitution image. The second collage is pretty incoherent. I coded it using a substitution image which causes too much fragmentation for my liking. However, that image is from R. Crumb’s Book of Genesis illustrations for the New Yorker. I can’t believe I’ve never heard about these beautiful drawings before.

Voronoi Diagram with Adaptive Subdivision

Voronoi Diagram with Adaptive Subdivision