I’m a bit of a frustrated mathematician, owing mostly to the fact that I didn’t have the guts to try to get a degree in Mathematics back in college (I took a visual arts course, instead). I was reminded of this yesterday as I was reading about NodeBox, a computational-art package for designers with numbers fetishes. One look at the galleries and I was immediately hooked (Superfolia, in particular, blew my mind). NodeBox is Mac OSX-only, and uses Python (a language I’m only vaguely familiar with, so it took me a bit of time to get comfortable with the very spartan programming environment).
Here’s my first piece, "Lolly", which finally came together after about an hour or so of mucking around this morning. From a math standpoint, this is all really, really basic stuff, but I have a small advantage in the color department, so this actually doesn’t look half-bad for a first-timer.
Lolly’s source code:
def lolly(x,y,sizelimit):
w = random(5,sizelimit)
h = w
r = random(0.6,1.0)
b = random(0.6,1.0)
c = color(r,0.75,b,1.0-(w*0.02))
c2 = color(r,0.5,b,0.6)
c3 = color(r,0.5,b,0.2)
fill(c)
stroke(c2)
strokewidth(3)
transform(CORNER)
rotate(-(random(0,90)))
oval(x,y,w,h)
stroke(c3)
strokewidth(2)
line(0,w/2,x,w/2)reset()
background(0.15,0.04,0.03,1.0)
for i in range(200):
lolly(random(350,500),0,40)c = color(1.0,1.0,0.95,1.0)
strokewidth(0)
fill(c)
star(0,0,50,400,10)for i in range(100):
lolly(random(100,200),0,15)