A 100×100 grid with nearly 200 lines that fill all 10,000 of the grids cells. The image is mostly computer generated, although I manually changed the randomly chosen colors of some of the lines.
This project evolved from the level generator I wrote for my puzzle games. When I used my level generator to create levels larger than those in my games, I found the results so interesting that I focused my development into turning my level generator into an art generator.
The gallery below shows examples of this artwork in roughly chronological order of when they were created. See: Galleries for many more examples.
The first five images were created using grid sizes of 25×25, 80×80, 90×90, and 100×100 (third and fifth images). The next three images are from a later phase of this artwork, with smoothed lines influenced by a gravitational pull. The ninth image features a polygonize effect. The last image, which I call a constellation map, shows only the similarity shading and the endpoints of each line, but not the actual lines. The colors of the lines were originally randomly chosen by my program, though I manually adjusted the colors of several lines for most of this artwork. The background shading is also computer generated, and based on Similarity Maps.
Behind the creation of this artwork is a distributed processing application that required thousands of hours of processing time to create the grids for some of the galleries on my website. I also designed an extensive GUI for creating and editing the images. Here is an example of the user interface I created to edit the color of lines:
My line editor , showing a 100×100 grid. The selected line, now yellow-orange, is 921 cells long. The “Custom” column shows that I manually changed the color for 6 of the 22 lines displayed in the grid.
Additional Pages
There are hundreds of additional images available here:
and here:
The following pages describe the program and process to create the images:
The Level Generator – The heart of the program. I give the program a board size, and it fills the board with lines. Kind of like a painter would with a blank canvas, though the program is restricted to drawing lines that follow the grid.
Similarity Maps – The similarity maps are a visual illustration of a process I call “Similarity Filtering” – designed to find the most unique levels for my game. While I put a lot of work into making the program make aesthetically pleasing levels, I never considered making it an art generator until I saw these.
Finding The Best Levels – This page describes the technical details of the process. I only look at images for 1 out of 200 levels generated by my program.
Art from Maps – Shows the adjustments I made to the program to turn the similarity maps into artwork.
The Process – Creating a new gallery from scratch is a several day process during which my computer is always working.