For some unfathomable reason I’ve been spending my nights doing the dishes and, amazingly enough, sleeping. I’ve much have caught something. Anyway, two samples of work in progress, both based on the voronoi code.

voronoiFractal 2

voronoiFractal 4

Don’t ask about 3. Three is not a nice piece, it escaped. It lurks in the space between the walls, growling… Occasionally, it comes out and eats computers.

closer

crystal

flow field

fine structure

rotator I

peripheral vision

synthese eines raumes

elements I

cathedral

rose at lagrange 2

haywire

parameter VI

alignment

92

:etrono:e

compound

deconstruct 2D-3D

h.trism

com III

velvet painting

2 minutes

turmoil

spring orchard

no i in me

self-centered

singular icon

cline > decline

I believe that there are many people out there that experiment with processing but don’t want to bother with domains or hosting. Well, my host has plenty of storage and monthly bandwitdh, far more than I’ll ever need. At this time there’s about 30Gb waiting to be filled (I’m currently using 60Mb) and I have about 300Gb bandwidth per month to spare.

So, if you got Processing sketches to share but no space to do it, feel free to send them over. Just a few pointers:

1. Code should be shared under a Creative Commons license, similar to the one at the bottom of this page. I’ll waste no space on private code.
2. Although it’s ultimately up to me to decide what goes online, I will not judge on esthetic or other purely personal grounds. The only criteria to refuse a piece are offensive content, malicious intent or blatant commercial abuse.
3. Sketches should be submitted by email (check contact) as a zipped archive of the applet folder generated by Processing.
4. I’ll host everything in a separate domain “guest.wblut.com” as a blog similar to mine. Each submitted piece will be a blog entry with link, screenshot, author, tags and description. Anything you want to go here, especially description and screenshot, you can put in the email. Keep the screenshot 450px wide or less (I don’t feel like messing with WordPress templates ). There are nicer alternatives than a simple blog, but it’s easier to keep content and comments organised.
5. I will not host any other files. There’s enough other options out there.

In return, I’ll do my best to keep everything nice, tidy and punctual. Just to be clear, I’m not out for money, my pages, including the guest blog, are advertisement free and will always remain that way .

Update : synchronicity… There’s another solution out there since the 22nd of march: http://www.openprocessing.org/. Cool, must be an idea whose time is right. Thanks to Andreas for pointing this out.

I set myself a challenge last weekend: starting only from the code for the intersection point of two lines, I would try to make a Voronoi fractal applet without using any further reference. This actually had a reason: I can draw a Voronoi graph on paper but I do not know how to draw it. Bear with me on this, it’ll make sense…

Try it yourself, constructing a sketch of a Voronoi graph is simple:

1. Draw some random dots.
2. Connect all dots with straight lines.
3. Bisect all connecting lines (i.e. draw a perpendicular straight line through the middle of the connecting lines).
4. Select pieces of the bisecting lines so each point is encapsulated in its own cell.

One of my rough sketches:

A deceptively simple process. Steps 1 to 3 are easy enough to implement, just a matter of basic geometry. The tricky part is point 4, I couldn’t figure out how I did it on paper. I, and undoubtely you too, just draw the cells based on the network of bisecting lines.

In the end, I found a way of making the computer do the same thing. But it involves a rather exhaustive search and is a far cry from the effortless elegance of a human being. Turning a Voronoi graph into something fractal-like was the next step. Getting the borders of each cell sorted out was a bit of headache but now works as long as floating-point errors don’t mess things up.

Two nights and an insight in yet another amazing way our brains work later, this is what I came up with. It definitely has potential for further development. As always the code is up for grabs (and rather rough). Currently, because it’s a bit of a memory hog, the online version is limited in depth . Update : I’ve replaced the applet with a new version using less memory.