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Genuary 2024, Days 1-6


[ creative-coding , genuary ]

Well, genuary 2024 is underway and I’ve made it to day 6! Here’s what I’ve done so far:

Day 1 - Particles, lots of them

Particles are old friends of mine. But I tried to do something a bit different here. I’d added some good old Robert Penner style tweening functions to my graphics library some time last year. But I never got a chance to use them. This was an opportunity. Thousands of particles tween between four different arrangements, with some jittering going on as well. The square and circle are just distributions within those shapes. For the words, I created another surface and drew the text onto that. Then randomly generated points, keeping them only if they hit the pixels of the text. Now I had four sets of points, just had to tween from one to the next, and so on.

Day 2 - No Palettes

I was trying to think of a way to get some strange color combinations by morphing between multiple points of defined colored values with other formulas going on. didn’t really get to where I wanted it, but it’s fine.

Day 3 - Droste effect

A silly one. A rare case of me actually using photographs in my work - a selfie even! OMG. A couple of things I could have done better on this. One is that I should have started with a higher res source image so I could start the first sub-image smaller and have it scale up to full size, rather than having it overscale and then snap into focus when it loops. The other one is to have smoother scaling. It’s smooth mathematically, but not perceptually. It’s a known formula when zooming in on, say, fractals. I’ve done it before but got lazy here.

Day 4 - Pixels

An old technique that I love. Sample each pixel of a source image and draw it to a destination image which gets displayed. Before you sample, you apply some kind of distortion to the coordinate you’re about to sample, but you draw it to the undistorted position in the destination. In this case, the distortion is some Simplex noise with varying parameters.

Day 5 - In the style of Vera Molnar

At some point in the last 5-10 years it became very trendy for generative artists to name Vera Molnar as an influence. OK. Nothing against her. Maybe something against trends. I liked this piece though, so I played around with some ideas and it turned into what I created here. A line of points is drawn at the top of the screen. The points are moved down a bit and randomized a bit. Repeat to the bottom of the screen. Intensify the randomization over time.

Day 6 - Screensaver

Flying toasters was too obvious. I made a screen. And tried to save it. Perlin noise on top of Simplex noise. (Or vice versa? I forget.) And some cheesy skeumorphism. I do kind of like the screen reflection. :)

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