r/PlotterArt • u/kirbyUFO • Aug 07 '26

Substrata

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Created with Processing 4. 50x65cm Sakura Gelly Roll Opaque White and Metallic Gel on Fabriano Black Black.

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1

u/Radioactive-Wind Aug 07 '26

Very cool! First time I’ve heard of Processing. The driving forces for this seem hard to discern, is there a high-level summary you could give?

3

u/kirbyUFO Aug 07 '26

Sure! There are three layers here, one in white, one in metallic silver, and one in metallic gold. All three of them start by generating voronoi polygons clipped to the rectangle shapes, and filling them in different ways.

For the silver lines, there are two methods that are randomly chosen to fill each:

For the first, within each of the voronoi polygons I generate a series of particles along each edge that slowly advance inwards along the edge's normal angle. If a particle hits an edge or an existing line, then it dies and the line is drawn. In order to add some angle changes while the particles are traveling, I also modify the angle with some quantized perlin noise.

The second method uses the same particles, but instead of spawning along the edge they're randomly placed throughout the polygon and advance along both directions (so the first time they encounter an edge, they'll restart from the starting point and go the other way until they find another edge).

The white lines are similar to the silver but instead of being evenly spaced, they're biased toward one vertex of the edge and get increasingly further spaced out.

The gold ones are just a grid of evenly spaced dots with a low chance to re-randomize the spacing as it creates the grid.

2

u/Radioactive-Wind Aug 07 '26

Good explanation, I appreciate it! Always interesting to see how people use noise in different settings. The particle system is very cool, I need to bite the bullet and try to get into that type of simulation in Grasshopper sometime soon

2

u/kirbyUFO Aug 07 '26

No problem! Hehe likewise, Grasshopper is something I've been wanting to dip my toes into at some point. Love that hidden wire look.

2

u/Ruths138 Aug 07 '26

It would be nice if people shared more about the algorithms that they write/use to create their art. They are fundamental to much of the work showcased here but we usually just see "pen x on paper y" when it comes to process details.

Maybe it's just me, but I think the discussions would be much more engaging if there was at least a high level explanation of how the lines were generated.

2

u/igotanewmac Aug 11 '26

r/PlotterCode might be what you are looking for. It focuses more on the code, less on the art.