Unattended

Pl. IV
Gallery

Pl. IV · Gallery

A gallery of seeds

Eight drawings, each made by a short program and a single number, the seed. The same seed always gives the same drawing. Change it, and you get a sibling that has never been drawn before.

§1 · Hang

Hover over a drawing, or tab to it, to watch it being made. Open one to change its settings, draw it again from a new seed, or download it.

  • No. 1 · Evenly spaced streamlines

    Combed

    Streamlines of a noise field, spaced so that no two ever touch.

  • No. 2 · Greedy circle packing

    Packing

    Circles dropped at random, each grown until it bumps into a neighbour.

  • No. 3 · Marching-squares contours

    Survey

    An island that never existed, mapped in contour lines as if someone had walked it.

  • No. 4 · Phyllotaxis (Vogel’s model)

    Divergence

    Seeds placed one by one, each turned 137.5° from the last. Move the angle a tenth of a degree and the spirals fall apart.

  • No. 5 · Recursive subdivision

    Partitions

    A sheet cut in two, and again, and again, until the cuts run out.

  • No. 6 · Poisson-disk stippling

    Moon

    A sphere shaded with nothing but dots, packed closer wherever the light falls away.

  • No. 7 · Two-colour Truchet tiling

    Meander

    One square tile, turned at random, and the paths that run across the joins.

  • No. 8 · Particles in a curl-noise field

    Drift

    Particles carried by an invisible current, each leaving a thread behind.

§2 · Method

How they are made

Every piece is a function that takes a seed and a few settings and returns lines, dots or shapes. All of its randomness comes from a small generator started from that seed, so nothing depends on the time or the machine. The drawing code is separate from the geometry, and the geometry is tested. Circles in the packing never overlap. Stipple dots keep their minimum distance. Streamlines never touch. The rectangles in the partitions tile the sheet exactly.

Each piece uses a different technique, from Poisson-disk sampling and marching squares to curl noise and Truchet tiles, and all of them are drawn in the site's inks, with one vermilion pen for emphasis. Switch the site to its dark theme and the gallery is reprinted on night paper.