During a late night web crawling session I found out that someone have reverse engineered (very much like I did) the Afternow Script. This was, as I’ve said before, the first attempt of a script that I ever made. It is also the one script I’ve done that have generated the most requests. Since Scriptographer is dead now I figure it couldn’t harm to link to it now, hope you don’t mind Jürg. The code is here and below are images of the three variations.
First out is the original Afternow.
Followed by my own version.
And lastly the one I found tonight.
This post marks the start of a new project, which came about heavily influenced by the image below, Mokafolio‘s project Weird Faces Study, made with PaperJS.
Long before this I had been wanting to make something modular and maybe even something that could generate some sort of seed value so that re-creating any previous attempts would be easy. Not sure whether this project qualifies as proceduraly generated as there is a very small amount of randomness in it. Instead it will rely heavily on the relationships between different points – or key locations whose values are determined by the input of the user.
The plan is to make a script that, given these values, will draw different faces (I told you it was heavily influenced), although with more control of the final output. The number of parameters will – if all goes according to what I plan – be quite high, probably at least twenty which will generate a rather long seed value.
In order for the seed value to be reasonably manageable I will use the LZW-compression algorithm hopefully reducing the seed to at least 75% of the original size. Thankfully, I’ve found a javascript implementation that will help a lot as I’m not that well versed in how it really works.
So, it all boils down to these checkpoints:
- Figure out what paramaters will be needed.
- How do the parameters relate to each other.
- Draw faces using these parameters.
- Create the GUI.
- Make seed values work.
As Gramham van de Ruit tweeted about a Sudoku Generator for InDesign I had to look up the possibilities of making such a tool for Scriptographer. I’ve had this idea before but I’ve never put any effort into it. Not surprisingly, it is a fairly complex matter. Fortunately, a friendly soul, named David J. Rager, had posted the source code of his online javascript Sudoku Generator (+solver) on his blog. Being the opportunist that I am I quickly “borrowed” (well, he said it was free to use) his code and from that it was an oh-so-easy task to just wrap some Sg code around it for use in Illustrator!
The script generates puzzles and renders them in full vector. Everything; the frame, hints and a non-visible solution, are included inside a group object. Find it here.
I’ve made yet another script to my dViz Tool Kit. Go here for the full brief…
I’ve also added a couple of pages devoted to all the scripts available in the package. Just navigate to the downloads section or click here.
And lastly the one I found tonight.
