Guilloché

Heres a pretty neat pattern set i stumbled across. Guilloché patterns were originally made on complex clockwork lathes in the 1500's. The designs were wildly popular in the golden age of the 1920's an 30's adorning everything from wristwatches to automobile engines. This technique was also used to make the famous Fabergé eggs.

Here is some variations on just one set, there are hundreds of different families of designs out there that I have yet to crack.

Maze

Here is the original idea i had that sprouted into the Line Garden code. Maze-like patterns generated recursively.


10 pixel path width


1 pixel path width

Line Gardens

This is just a quick proto-type of what Im playing with this past week. I have been busy and haven had a chance to make a post in awhile so here it is. Randomly draws lines recursively along right angles. Lines always start at the bottom edge and create a gradient effect.

Eventually, the goal was to make a sort of maze generator with this. As usual though, this quick, first-step draft of the idea made some unexpectedly cool results.


131 Recursions, maxLength 100, maxAge 1000;


1,805 Recursions, maxLength 100, maxAge 1000;


6,771 Recursions, maxLength 100, maxAge 1000;


1,011 Recursions, maxLength 10, maxAge 1000


21,701 Recursions, maxLength 10, maxAge1000


42,897 Recursions, maxLength 10, maxAge 100

Flow Grid

Heres a pretty interesting and unexpected result i stumbled on while messing with the flow algorithm. it came from using a very low resolution array for recording the particle motions. this leads to some strange effects at borders between cells.

Flow

This past week ive been playing with recording the movement of the particles so they can interact with eachother over time rather then just within one itteration. It took a little time and frustration to get it to start working like i imagined but i am now getting some pretty neat results! to program uses a Bresenham line algorithim to record each particles movement onto a discrete grid. currently ive only experimented with recording the average velocities within each grid, but many other things should be able to be done with it.

the initial goal i had in mind was to have particles be affected by the average direction of motion of previous particles at thier location and create river like branching patterns over time.

here is one of the earlier examples. you can see some subtle coherent behavior but it is still mostly ruled by each particles random motion.



after tweaking some of the parameters, i was able to get more well defined branching patterns

Spirograph

Another use of my particle class. A main attractor particle is moved on a circular path. All other particles are attracted to the main particle according to their distance from it. Different forms emerge depending on initial positions and circle radius.

Fuzzy Explosions

Explosions:

5000 white particles, 10 second exposure


5000 white particles, 20 second exposure


5000 randomly shaded particles, 10 second exposure


5000 randomly shaded particles, 50 second exposure

Particles

Lately I have been playing around with creating a particle class in java. Each particle object represents a x-y point. By writing various methods controlling their movement and drawing attributes, some pretty cool images can be made.

Recursive circle spiral

These image are made of circles centered along an archimedes spiral. Each has a different spiral frame, circle sizing, and circle creation rate.

Download Source Code







Download Java Applet
controls:
1,2-spiral magnifaction
q,w-spiral tightness
a,s- circle spacing
z,x circle sizing
click mouse to save screenshot