Posts
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Let there be sound
And there was sound.
Plans
As 2023 is now half over (wtf?), it’s time to look back on my end of year post, where I made some plans. https://www.bit-101.com/2017/2022/12/
- Create my own interpreted language.
- I want to finally do something with music.
- I’d love to do another side project creating graphics for something.
- Of course, I’ll finish the Coding Curves project.
Not sure if number 1 will happen this year. Or number 2. I did wrap up Coding Curves! So that’s good.
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Coding Color 01
I’m embarking on a new series of posts about coding color. And I’m pretty excited about this one.
Color is Complicated
… in which I attempt to overwhelm the reader by listing out everything you could possibly write about color. Feel free to skip.
Color is a complex subject to write about, because there are so many ways to approach it. What even is color?
We generally experience color as a property of _thing_s. “That apple is red.” It’s more accurate to say that color is a property of light, but we rarely say “the light bouncing off that apple is red.”
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Coding Curves 14: Miscellaneous Curves
Chapter 14 of Coding Curves
This is the last planned chapter of this series. I might add another one here or there in the future if I find a new interesting curve to write about. There were also a couple of topics on my original list which I decided to hold back. I might change my mind about them someday. Any future additions will be added to the index.
For this “final” installment, I thought I’d cover a few random curves that probably wouldn’t be worth a full chapter in themselves. And I thought it would be good to kind of walk through the process I actually take when I go to code up some formula I discover.
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Coding Curves 13: Superellipses and Superformulas
Chapter 13 of Coding Curves
In this chapter we’ll be talking about some interesting shapes. Superellipses are quite useful in design and UI work, especially a specific superellipse we’ve come to know affectionately as the “squircle”. These are basically rounded rectangles, but with some neat properties. Superformulas are an extension of superellipses. They are more complicated, probably less useful, but interesting in their own right. Let’s dive in.
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Coding Curves 12: Guilloche Patterns
Chapter 12 of Coding Curves
Guilloche patterns are very intricate and fascinating patterns. You’ll often find them on bank notes and other official documents as well as watches and other intricate machinery. Because they are so intricate and complex, and often engraved into metal, they are usually done by machines themselves. Imagine a high end spirograph machine with a metal etching tool rather than a ball point pen. The name “Guilloche pattern” is rather vague and can apply to all kinds of similar patterns. I’m going to explain how to make a pattern like the one you see here:
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Coding Curves 11: Roses
Chapter 11 of Coding Curves
Now we come to another one of my favorite types of curves – roses or rose curves. To me, these look a lot like circular Lissajous curves, or very regular harmonographs. In fact, they are a special instance of hypotrochoids, but special enough to look at on their own. Just to give you some instant visuals, here’s a rose curve:
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2022 in Review
I’ll keep this light this year. Professionally, a strange and difficult year. But at least I still have a job, so I’m grateful for that.
Beyond the job though, I did do some fun coding projects.
Probably the biggest was my raytracing journey. I’ve never been super interested in that kind of photo-realistic rendering from an artistic viewpoint. But working through the books and creating the renderer itself was the most fun I’ve had coding in ages. Of course, once it was sufficiently “complete”, I kind of lost interest in it. It didn’t really change the basic fact that 3D stuff is not what I’m really interested in creatively. That said, I’ll probably play with it some more in the future. My original thinking was to do some kind of generative stuff that could then be rendered in 3D. But “generative” fairly often means lots of individually created units interacting in some way – at least the way I usually do generative. so it can get expensive rendering hundreds or thousands of objects. I might need to look more into optimizing the engine – I skipped that chapter in the book!
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Coding Curves 10: Spirals
Chapter 10 of Coding Curves
OK, let’s talk spirals.
Spirals are a lot like circles, in that they are a set of points with a distance relationship to a fixed center point. But unlike circles, where that distance is fixed, with spirals, that distance varies. The distance from a given point to the center point is generally a function based on the angle between those two points. So you’ll usually have some function that takes in an angle and returns a radius. Then you can use the radius and angle to find the x, y position of the point at that angle. There are many different spiral formulas, which give you spirals that have a different look and feel. Let’s start with one of the most basic spirals.
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Coding Curves 09: Roulette Curves
Chapter 9 of Coding Curves
Initially I was going to title this chapter “Trochoids and Cycloids”. I thought they were two different, but related things. As I got into it, I realized I was very confused about what each thing was. Actually a cycloid is just a very specific type of trochoid. I’ll forgive myself though. Here are the definitions of each on Wikipedia:
In geometry, a trochoid (from Greek trochos ‘wheel’) is a roulette curve formed by a circle rolling along a line.
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Coding Curves 08: Bézier Curves
Chapter 8 of the Coding Curves Series
I had to hold myself back here. Bézier curves are fun to program, fascinating to explore, and you can go down a deep hole in explaining how they are constructed and what the formulas mean. The thing is, I’ve already done that a few times. In books and in videos. Here’s a couple of my own videos you might want to check out to learn more:
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