GENUARY
GENUARY is an artificially generated month of time where we build code that makes beautiful things. In 2021, I saw a co-worker participate and looked really cool. So I wanted to try it. Here are the prompts.
Preparing for this, I setup a few goals and guidelines for myself:
- Use Unity - I'm in PHP and web world too much, I wanted to have fun in Unity.
- Setup a framework so I can generate hundreds if not thousands of iterations at a go.
- Save Images of each iteration.
- Save whatever data I need so I can re-build each iteration if I want to go back to tweak, switch out color palettes or whatever.
I spent a lot more time with not too many results but I had a lot of fun doing it.
Jan 01
Draw 10,000 of something.
Jan 02
Dithering.
For this, I just used a custom shader to dither. Pretty interesting to learn about all the different ways to dither. The first image were test images in one of the linked articles. The second was a picture from an old trip to India.
Jan 03
Space.
I was originally going to just upload a black square to make it an easy day. But then I wanted to play with some shaders and see if I could get them to glow. Wish I had some more time to play with this, I wanted to get the "cloud" look, like the Milky Way, but ran out of time. Maybe another day.
Random spheres, sizes, colors and position.
Jan 04 - The next next Fidenza.
First, check out Tyler Hobbs and everything behind his Fidenza work. Its pretty crazy and cool.
For this I totally got lost (had fun) in flow fields and generating random meshes in Unity. A lot of fun but I spent too much time on the code side. I would love to spend time now on the actually visuals. All, the core pieces are there now so maybe I can return to this for another prompt later on.
First image is the final result.
Second, you can see how the image is generated. The spheres move, which gives me the points for the meshes.
Third, One of the first attempts, but the lines would get jagged half way through.
Fourth, more tweaking.
Fifth, even more tweaking.
Jan 05 - Destroy a square.
So this was fun! and quick.
Second is vertical destroyer.
Third is a destroyer from the left, with and without gravity.
Jan 06 - Trade styles with a friend.
For the Space prompt I saw a lot of other people do "Solar Systems". I've always wanted to try and do our solar system in Unity. So for this I did completely Randomly Generated Solar Systems.
Jan 07 - Sol LeWitt Wall Drawing.
One of the links provided a prompt Sol LeWitt apparently gave to a class as a visiting artist and lecturer.
"On a wall surface, any
continuous stretch of wall,
using a hard pencil, place
fifty points at random.
The points should be evenly
distributed over the area
of the wall. All of the
points should be connected
by straight lines. "
I adapted this slightly. There are 50 points positioned at random but with a slight bias to the center of the image. Each point connects to the next and previous 2 points in the series.
Jan 08 - Single curve only.
For this day, I just created random spline curves.
And now as you can see my month got a lot more busy... I had a few other days started and a few more ideas bouncing around in my head, but thats all to show here.