chromsan-Interruptions

My observations:

  1. The lines are drawn in a square
  2. There are 55-60 lines per side
  3. Each line is the same length
  4. The lines can either intersect each other or not
  5. The lines that intersect only do so on each other's ends- they never cross in the middle
  6. The majority of the lines are vertical
  7. Non-vertical lines rotate several degrees left or right, but are never horizontal
  8. The lines are rotated about their ends middles
  9. There are sometimes white areas in the center of the square with no lines within
  10. The white areas account for ~0-10% of the total area

I started by creating a grid of lines. It seemed like the lines' spacing was more important than the number of lines, so I opted to base my for loops on padding values rather than by line number. Next I worked on creating the semi-random rotation values for the lines. I accomplished this by utilizing p5's built in vector object which I could use to create an angle for each by using the fromAngle constructor. For the angle values, I experimented with both the noise function and randomGaussian function before settling on the latter. A key feature of Molnár's work is that the lines are mostly vertical, and the randomGaussian function allowed me set the median to 90 degrees and then allow a certain amount of randomness by giving the function a standard deviation of around 30.

A problem I ran into at this point was that I was rotating the lines around the endpoints fixed to the grid and the lines were intersecting each other in the middles- something that does not happen in Molnár's work. I eventually found a solution to this by fixing the lines to the grid by their center points, thus ensuring that any overlapping only occurs on the ends of the line segments. After playing with the values, the result is quite close to the way that the lines in the reference works behave.

Finally, the white spaces. For these I used the noise function and took advantage of the double for loop to create a noise map in 2D space. I mapped the values on the range [0, 255] such that I could pick some arbitrary color of gray, say 155, and use that as a mask. Any time that the color value of the map goes above 155, no lines are drawn. With an appropriate offset value to keep the size and quantity of the holes correct, the result is somewhat similar to the random quality of Molnár's. However, hers is slightly different in that the holes are both small and large. Using this technique, I am not able to get the same effect because any offset value I choose will create a map with uniform variations. In other words, I can either get large or small holes, not both. This is definitely the main area to improve on. I'd be quite interested to see how she achieved this unique affect.