at some point several people asked me whether it was inspired by enso (i didnt know about enso at the time) or whether i was involved in the Arrival visual effects (i was not) because of this higher resolution rendition of the same algorithm https://img.inconvergent.net/generative/78b7266.html
with danger of nitpicking: it's more meta programming that has drawn me to lisp (rather than functional programming). the most recent post on my site describes an aspect of this (datalog for drawings as graphs in common lisp). i figured the distinction is worth pointing out
the most interesting part (as far as i'm concerned. i have some bias here ...) is the stuff about manipulating the graph structure. the concept is described in the readme, and does not rely that heavily on CL knowledge. it's not that the method is new or anything, just that i think it's a neat way to think about it. if you are interested in the code at large, then, yeah .. this isn't a good intro to CL.
I'm curious if you have any thoughts on doing the art stuff full time. I also have a mathematics background, and I have been working towards getting into digital art (not just generative art). While I work in software engineering now, having a more explicitly "creative" job has always seemed interesting to me. It seems there's a place out there for stuff like this, getting to consult with things like movie production and other art installations, for example.
How do you feel about the recent explosion of interest in generative art? Rather bizarrely it seems that people seem to think it developed out of crypto/NFTs and are unaware that people were doing it before it became hitched to this dubious trend. Do you think it will become tainted by association or can it actually benefit from all this attention?
i find that hard to estimate. a day or less for some. i ported the webby thing to vanilla js in a couple of days. might have been slightly faster if i used p5js. but others might take weeks or even months. depending on how much experience you have spent working with graph structures for example. as with a lot of programming it's not always that hard if you know precisely what you are making (if you have done it before.) related: someone who has not done a lot of generative art might be surprised by how complicated some things are and others aren't. not always obvious from the visual result. edit: i guess maybe you just meant how long it would take me. but the answer is sort of the same.
Thanks for the detailed reply. I meant p5.js instead of the python version so thanks for mentioning that as well. And yes, I was asking just out of curiosity how long it would take you(specifically) if you did the same piece in p5.js as well as in your system given your experience in the field.
I'm talking about correctness in the physical optics/lens sense. With lenses, light always passes uniformly through the aperture, where sphere sampling is non-uniform.
Intention is totally fine. This is reasonable if you actually intended to do something different than what a camera does, or if the intention is not physical correctness. This blog post seems to be intending to do something easy for picking samples, as opposed to something optically correct. I'm all for easy, but I also think it never hurts to understand the tradeoff you're choosing, nor to present the harder alternatives.
It's also worth considering disk sampling rather than sphere sampling, because it's barely any harder, and it will make the code converge to the same quality something like 2x faster. Sphere sampling spends too much time in the middle and not enough at the edges. Disk sampling only takes a teeny tiny bit more arithmetic. Jittering & QMC methods will also help a lot with efficiency.
yeah, i'm going for easy. and also, easily explainable. i like to leave some of the details up to whoever tries it. which is also why i generally don't include code anymore. i guess i could have had more references though.
sphere sampling has the appearance i want. but sampling inside discs with a probability over the disc radius would also work, probably. i didn't try it here.
If you don't mind me asking, can you recommend any good resources for getting into generative art?
I've been interested for a while and played around a bit, but I'd like to dive in a bit more since I have a bit more spare time now than I've had in while.
there are some references on my website. see the faq and the generative section. there are many ways to start. depends on your previous knowledge and how you prefer to work. the nature of code is a book that might be of interest. Nervous System have written up several of their projects. then there is the work by early generative artists. Vera Molnar, Frieder Nake, Manfred Mohr, Lillian Schwartz, among others. also, see https://github.com/terkelg/awesome-creative-coding/blob/mast...
you get unwanted artefacts in the results if you don't use some randomness. having said that, there might ways of reducing the need for it (which would be more efficient).
Another way to look at it is that you need Pinterest results in google image search in order to help finding content on Pinterest that infringes your copyright.
