There’s a reason I’ll never consider myself to be an artist: I never end up with anything resembling the initial idea. This is a good thing since I have no significant initial ideas, no images in my head. Frankly, my starting points are dull: intersecting lines, rotating boxes, tracing particles…

Actually, I remember doing the same thing as a kid with LEGO. Throw away the instructions, fiddle around with the blocks and see what it ends up as. One thing you couldn’t do was ask me to build a duck. I might have made one once, but chances are I was going for a racecar…

Anyway, during my holidays I felt like implementing a marching cubes algorithm. (Yes the weather was that bad.) In itself this is not very exciting, but once written the possibilities are endless. (By the way, someone should really publish a marching squares and cubes library for Processing.*)

Two constructs for now. SeRII is a new take on an older piece. Tardis is an entry for the “most convoluted way to achieve an old school demo effect” awards. Both pieces are mostly using the same scrapbook code in Processing 0148 beta.

* I’m quietly hoping that this has already been done. Quite probable, since every other idea I have comes a few days short of being new

When I cobbled together ‘fine structure‘, I also tried my hand on a 3D version. For over a year, I completely forgot where I put the code, until this evening. Most of the code is rough but two pieces are presentable. Click the images to go to the constructs.

When in lo-res, move the mouse up or down to adjust the threshold level of the noise curves. Clicking the applet switches between dynamic lo-res mode and static hi-res mode.

Curiouser and curiouser… I was cleaning up some old folders this afternoon and found an interesting processing sketch from 2005. I can’t remember writing it but the header and the code point an accusing finger at me. A qui(r)ck conversion to v.135 and voila.

Left mouse click freezes the tangle and changes the rendering. Pressing spacebar will save the image to the user gallery, enable pop-ups from this site if you want your own copy. Any other key randomly generates a new tangle.

Enjoy!

Update: on some platforms, it looks plain weird. A non-OpenGL version can be found here

A quick update of tiefRot after discovering the wonderful hint(ENABLE_OPENGL_4X_SMOOTH). Arr, treasures lie hidden in many a source code.
The applet and code can be found here. Click here for a variation. Press spacebar to save the image to the user gallery. Btw, all the segments in the piece have the same surface area.

A word of caution, I’ve been having some problems with the browser freezing when quickly reloading or switching between applets, especially if using OpenGL. My hunch is that the image buffer doesn’t get garbage collected but I’m not technical enough to do anything about it. So if you encounter the same thing, let me know…For now, it’s probably easier to download the code and play around with it in Processing, version 135 BETA. Because of security risks, I’m not releasing the “framePoster” code, the class responsible for saving the images to the user gallery. No worry, this resource got me started (and finished).

Update: writing the above got my thinking muscle working. I didn’t have the problem before. So what changed? Different browser and Java versions turned out to be a red herring. The only other change was that I started to reorganize my applets reusing core Processing and OpenGL .jar archives in a single folder. Surely, this shouldn’t make any difference. Still, when I put every applet in a separate folder including a copy of each archive, the problem goes away. (Yay!). When switching between applets the memory used by the browser is now stable instead of increasing continuously .