Generative – Nate Nolting

The Insane Squiggle Machine Revisited

This week I went back to my set of Squiggle drawings and brought them into p5.js. Every time I work with this library I figure out a little more. This one is made with tints given to images from pallets collected from Coolers.co, various transformations (I didn’t know there was an imageMode(CENTER) command for centering an image at an X and Y coordinate, that saved me some time), and the use of beginShape() and beginContour() to create a compound shape.

This is a sample of what I start with. I pages and pages of these types of things in various sketchbooks.

What this is what I get p5.js to generate from these:

Code

Waves

Code

Lines from sketches

Yesterday I was working on some experiments with using hand-drawn lines and using them in place of the line function in p5.js, scaling them like I would with a stroke width. Adding rotation, tint, and translation I was able to get some interesting results. Some of the images were made using the mouse x and y to control the translation.

Code

Painterly Experiments

I’ve been playing with a way to generate a painterly look in p5.js. To start I created several meandering paths, each of which would get a color to paint with.

From here it was a matter of applying stroke weights, opacity, and a little rotation to turn them into something that resembles paintings.

I feel like these would then make good backgrounds for other generative works. Things I going forward would add would be a brushstroke texture to these and maybe some sort of drips/splatter to make them appear even more organic.

Here’s the code for these if you want to take a peek at how these were made.

Fracture

I was experimenting with filling ellipses and other rounded containers with textures. By scanning across a square container around the shape I could find where the two of the shapes overlap with the help of bmoren/p5.collide2D

After I have that set of points I found that it was then pretty easy to pack the shape with other shapes. The easiest was triangles, taking a random 3 of the points to create various sizes. The hardest part was making sure that none of the triangles overlapped, then for flavor, I figured out how to round the corners.

Here’s the sketch for these.

Another grid thingy

Today I worked on another grid-based generative sketch, taking a set of patterns and assigning them to each cell on the grid. I also wanted to work with variations in the size of the cells. The patterns that get generated are all size-based so no matter how big or small they are the design will hold its proportions.

I used color pallets from Coolors and converted the hex colors from there to HSL colors with these.

Curtains

I have been trying to figure out container packing in p5.js. After messing around for a while I ended up finding the package mapbox/potpack, which will take a list of containers and sort them so that they will fit into a more or less rectangular space.

I came up with these sketches that kinda looked like curtains to me.

Cubes and Headaches

This was done by iterating over a grid and change the distance between the back and front of the cubes. At first the top and right were solid colors but I thought they looked better with a little texture. Thousands of points.

My son Miles looked at this and said it was giving him a headache. That or it’s the air quality right now here in Northern Minnesota.

After this first sketch, I took it and broke it. These experiments took forever to render. I’ll bet there’s a better way.

ISM Variations

Back to the Insane Quiggle Machine

A couple of years ago I created a tool called “The Insane Quiggle Machine“, which was an effort to create generative art from doodles using CSS / HTML / JS. I ended up producing a coloring book with the images that this system generated. Looking back now if I’d known about Processing I would have probably used that instead of trying to reinvent the wheel. Regardless it was a thing that I made and that was that.

Now enter p5.js and I see the potential of creating generative art from small doodles again to create something random out of those elements.

Right now I have 49 small elements that are rendered onto the canvas in a random order, layering up and up. I’m thinking of coming up with different sets of images and subject matter.

Here’s the code I used to generate these with p5.js.

const wW = 10000;
const wH = 10000;
let saveCount = 0;
let images = [];
const maxIterations = 500;

function preload() {
  for (let i = 1; i <= 48; i++) {
    images.push({ id: i, img: loadImage(`images/squiggle-${i}.png`) });
  }
}

function setup() {
  createCanvas(wW, wH);
  colorMode(HSB, 359, 100, 100, 100);
}

function saveFileName()
{
  let fileName = `screenshot_i_${maxIterations}_${saveCount}.png`;
  saveCount++;
  return fileName;
}

function squiggle()
{
  const thisCurrentImg = random(images);

  push();
  translate(random(wW / 4.25, wW / 1.25), random(wH / 4.75, wH / 1.25));
  scale(random(0.125, .9));
  rotate(random(45, 180));
  if (thisCurrentImg) {
    image(thisCurrentImg.img, 0, 0);
  }

  pop();
}

function draw() {
  noLoop();
  background(0, 0, 100, 100);
  for (var i = 1; i <= maxIterations; i++) {
    squiggle();
  }

  console.log(maxIterations + ' iteration reached!');
  save(saveFileName());
}

function keyPressed() {
  if (key === 'Enter') {
    redraw();
  }

  if (key === 's') {
    save(saveFileName());
  }
}