BIT-101
Bill Gates touched my MacBook Pro
Days 19 through 25 of genuary 2024!
This isn’t really flocking. I explored flocking algorithms many years ago. I may have even written a book chapter about them at one time. They’re super interesting but I wasn’t super interested in diving into them at this point in time. So I did a little particle system. Experimented with scenes and how to make it loop smoothly. I just have the particles swooping in from the left, randomly wandering for a bit and then swooping out to the right. That leaves the canvas clear for the next swoop.
This is an old technique I’ve been using for years, but I like that I was able to push it to a bit of a new level this time. Just drawing some lines across the screen. Test a hidden canvas that has something drawn to it. If you hit the drawing, you change the y position of the line. I tweened the height, and got some moving waves going in the lines. Kind of looks like an island rising out of the sea. Is it “generative typography”? I’d say no, but I like it.
Well, this is OpenGL. I’ve used it before, but it’s been many a year. Done some WebGL too. But really only scratched the surface of either. It’s been on my list to explore it a bit more again, so this was a good opportunity. There’s a go-gl library for Go, that I was able to get running. Most people to the colored triangle as their GL “hello world”. I render a few thousand points. Anyway, I got a project template set up for OpenGL projects in Go, so once I’m done with the rest of this genuary melarky, I’ll be able to explore some more. I’ll also use this for Day 30, I think, which is Shaders.
One thing I did here to create the animation was to export a bitmap after each frame render. I used a custom bitmap encoder I made a couple of years ago. Worked like a charm.
I’m really not a fan of the “do something in the style of such and such artist” prompts. This one was pushing Kandinsky. Aight. I just did an animation of a bunch of points, then lines connecting them, then they turn into a plane, which turns into a point and starts all over again. A few cool techniques in this one though. I figured out how to do Poisson Disk Sampling, which is pretty neat. And added that to my library. Then I did my tried and true “connect-nearby-points-with-lines” technique. Followed by a convex hull algorithm, and an easing function. All tied together in a number of scenes.
As a lot of people discovered, this prompt was purposely rigged to give different x-by-x numbers to different people. I got 32x32 on my computer, but 128x128 on my phone. I went with 32. I made a 32x32 grid of squares. In each one I drew concentric, rotated squares, a technique I’ve been playing with lately. They formed an interesting pattern at this scale. I timed them so that pattern formed an expanding ring.
Subtitle, “undecided geometry”. I think a lot of people did isometric stuff for this one. Thank you Monument Valley. I tried to make this so that it would force your eye to see it differently when it rotated. I can see both ways each time though, but it does kind of shift around.
Long prompt for this one:
If you like generative art, you probably have some photos on your phone of cool looking patterns, textures, shapes or things that you’ve seen. You might have even thought, “I should try to recreate this with code”. Today is the day.
I had been on a flight a little while back. Took some photos from the plane on the runway, trying to catch a sunrise. But it was rainy and I mostly just got a picture of raindrops on the window. Tried to recreate that. It came out… OK, I guess.
Six days to go!
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