Shapevent

When I was in 6th or 7th grade I used to spend hours playing with Kai’s Power Tools or KPT 1.0. I used to imagine creating my own version of a the texture explorer… I’m still inspired by memories of KPT…

A few months back I read an article about snowflakes in cabinate magazine and for some reason it gave me an idea for a texture generator.

This sketch generates 64 textures - you can click them to see the full-sized texture - simply click again to go back to the thumbnail view.


Click above image to see flash version

After creating this I realized it wouldn’t be very hard to animate them:

Click above Image to see ANIMATED flash version

I also tried applying random colors but wasn’t too happy with the results - I’d say about 70% of the colored textures are hideous… the ones that aren’t look pretty good. I still prefer the black and white ones…

I may restrict the colors to a set pallet to remedy the problem, but for now I’m just going to leave it as is. Here are a few select results that I thought came out alright.

Click any of the above images to see flash version

I used Grant Skinner’s Random Seed class so that if something really interesting came up I’d easily be able to regenerate it. My current generator chooses a seed from 0-100… so there are really only 100 sets of 64 textures. If i decide to take this further, I may add the ability to enter the seed via an input textbox…

I have a folder on my computer filled with strange variations of cellular automata. I’ve spent many hours playing with the life lexicon - but most of the cellular automata experiments I have in this folder are similar (at least in their simplicity) to your standard sand CA. I usually base the rules on the color of each pixel. For instance:

- scatter a few randomly colored pixels here and there
- if a pixel is not black
- calculate a slightly darker variation of the current pixels color
- surround the current pixel with this color

Here is a variation on that idea - it’s a bit more complex than the above description, but the principal is the same:

Click above image to see flash version

It’s a bit easier to understand what’s happening here in the following example:

Click above image to see flash version

I’ll be posting things from my Cellular Automata folder regularly…

This is another sketch I did while developing my library for fast drawing. It is made up of 5,000 transparent squares.

It reminds me of a sand dollar:




Click either of the above images to see the flash version

The transparent squares are placed in a circular formation using polar coordinates. The squares can be pushed/separated with the mouse.