First out is the original Afternow.
Followed by my own version.
And lastly the one I found tonight.

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.

The Hyperbolic Line Converter has gotten a name change to Hyperbolic Lines as it is from now on possible to make new lines by entering degree values. There is also a new option to choose what side of the disk the lines will be drawn.

The new addition to the tools is the Measures script. Measures is useful to create rulers, gauges, scales etc. If a path is selected when pressing the ‘Make Ruler’-button the script will use that path as the spine/baseline of the ruler, otherwise it will create an ordinary straight ruler of entered length. The ‘Length’-option works differently when using percent as unit. The drawn ruler will ALWAYS be 100pt long and the ‘Length’-value is instead used to tell the script how high the scales max value is.

The package – as of 2012/12/29 – contains these scripts:

- Analog Clock
- Circular Bar Graph
- Hyperbolic Line
- Measures
- Polar Grid
- Polar Area / Pie Graph
- Radiating Bars Graph
- Stacks

Download dViz Tools here.

ANALOG CLOCK – v1.01
Make analog clocks that display either the current time or time set by the user. Very simple but may come in handy some time.

CIRCULAR BAR GRAPH – v1.01
A bar graph that bends like a circle. Each bar can be offset from the base as well. The user may set the amount of degrees the bars will turn, from 45°-360°. Another nice feature is the possibility to have variable max values to each bar. For instance: a bar value of 1 with a max value of 2 will look exactly the same as a bar value of 55 with max at 110.

HYPERBOLIC LINE – v1.1
Draw a circle and make sure it is selected before running the script. You can then either; draw lines on the perimeter of the circle, select them and press the ‘Convert Selected Paths’-button, or; enter degree values and press the ‘Make Line From Angles’-button, to produce the hyperbolic lines. With the ‘Draw Side’-list you can choose to draw the lines on the inside or outside of the disk.

MEASURES – v1.0
Measures is useful to create rulers, gauges, scales etc. If a path is selected when pressing the ‘Make Ruler’-button the script will use that path as the spine/baseline of the ruler, otherwise it will create an ordinary straight ruler of entered length. The ‘Length’-option works differently when using percent as unit. The drawn ruler will ALWAYS be 100pt long and the ‘Length’-value is instead used to tell the script how high the scales max value is.

POLAR GRID – v1.0
It has always bothered me that the AI Polar Grid Tool just makes lines. I want each cell to be an own object. This tool does that. Plus, it also supports variable number of sub-divisions per ring. The sourcecode of the main function is located here.

POLAR AREA / PIE GRAPH – v1.0
Pie Charts can be made in AI. In many ways far superior than my take but my version does however offer the possibility to make polar area diagrams as well.

RADIATING BARS GRAPH – v1.0
This graph, as the name so aptly suggests, radiates its bars from a center point. If, using the ‘Bars Touching’ option, the graph turns into a variant of a polar area diagram.

STACKS – v1.01
Stacks is a script to quickly fill an amount of columns and rows with a designated key object.

I also made a polar area diagram raster. As the sectors will grow, or shrink, depending on the amount of color there will be more background, thus yielding a slightly darker image compared to the pie chart raster.

When dividing the stroke width with a smaller number, a “thicker” pattern emerged.

Going below 1, another surprising effect happened…

Now, when I had an image to work with I quickly wrote a function that divide the image into a number of rectangles that then takes on the average color of its underlying area – I’ll be refering to this rectangle as the color sampling area. This function then calls other small functions that applies all the different rasters I could think of. Here is a run-down of the effects.

STANDARD MOSAIC RASTER
This is a pretty straight forward mosaic raster effect but I managed to optimize the process as it’s usually made by drawing a bunch of rectangles that acts like a pixel. This will put considerable strain to Illustrator because, as we all know, a rectangle has four corners that it has to keep track of. Therefore the amount of anchor points will be four times that of the number of objects.

The image above contains 16,384 rectangle objects which would, under normal circumstances, equal to 65,536 anchor points. But, instead of making rectangles I’m drawing the objects as vertical lines with strokes applied to the lines the size of the sample area. This way I get by with only half of the anchor points; 32,768. The two images below show the difference.

351 rectangles = 1,404 anchor points

351 paths = 702 anchor points

Another advantage, I think, is that I can choose to modify the width of the strokes. Below is an image that has the exact same properties as the previous only the stroke width is half of the color sampled area. This results in a kind of white, vertical interference pattern.

RGB PIXEL RASTER
This is supposed to imitate the pixels of old cathode ray TVs. Nothing fancy but just something that I had to try out.

It made for a somewhat nice effect but not very special. Not until I started to play around and rotating each pixel by 90 degrees increments yielding a very prominent pattern. While I was kinda surprised at the outcome it seems it’s too limited to be of any use.

In an effort to reduce the patterning a bit I let the “rgb-pixels” rotate randomly, again in 90 degrees increments.

This could have been it had I not kept on manipulating the outcome. I isolated the different color channels in Photoshop but neither the red nor the blue channel where very interesting. The green one, though, was way cooler.

Clearly this cross-hatch pattern has a lot more to offer than the previous two. So much so, in fact, that I imported the result to Photoshop where I ramped up the contrast and had the green color desaturated.

I feel the end-result is interesting enough to warrant its own script. Got to get to it.

DASHED RGB PIXEL RASTER
When thinking of CRT pixels I came up with yet another way. What if the red, green and blue intensity of each pixel was always at its maximum value and instead just activate parts of it. I don’t really know how to explain it, but I’ll give it a try. Below, anyway, is the final outcome and at first, it didn’t come out quite as I expected. It looks kinda inverted, but…

…the colors are still preserved and when adding a black background it turns the image into this.

Each of the sampled areas are divided into 3 x 8 “cells”. The higher value of each color channel the more of the “cells” are going to be filled in.

For instance, above is the average color of the complete Lenna image. The color components are, [177, 99, 106], so dividing by 32 and rounding to its nearest integer on each channel, gives [6, 3, 3]. So, for the red channel, 6 out of 8 “cells” are filled. Green channel, 3 out of 8 are filled and for the blue – yep you guessed it – 3 out of 8. These numbers are then randomly distributed which means that two colors with exactly the same channel values might not be diplayed in the same way.
Unfortunately, Illustrator can only make dashed strokes with a maximum of three dashes and three gaps. Therefore, a line in the form of;

dashArray = [dash, gap, dash, gap, dash, gap, dash]

will not display correctly as Illustrator simply ignores the input from the last dash and onwards. Instead – as a workaround – the last dash will have to be added to the first. So, let’s say a color channel array looks like this;

dashArray = [1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 2]

In order to be a valid dash array it would have to be re-arranged like this;

dashArray = [3, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0]

I don’t know if I’m making any sense trying to explain how it works but the end-result is quite nice, I think.

RGB + CMYK PIXEL RASTER
Now this is starting to get a little too far fetched. I split each sample area into an 8 “cell” pixel, converted all color channels into binary and performed almost like a bitwise OR operation.

The same average image color as before. The color channels – in binary – reads like:

red   = 10110100
green = 01100011
blue  = 01101001

Then, taking one number from each channel in sequential order yields RGB values as such:

Red   = rgb(1, 0, 0)
Cyan  = rgb(0, 1, 1)
White = rgb(1, 1, 1)
Red   = rgb(1, 0, 0)
Blue  = rgb(0, 0, 1)
Red   = rgb(1, 0, 0)
Green = rgb(0, 1, 0)

and finally

Cyan  = rgb(0, 1, 1)

I know, I’m not making any sense here and I think the outcome is not very comprehensive either, or nice for that matter. Maybe it could used for glitch art or something. Anyway, one can BARELY work out some details in the image so I guess this one is the least useful of the bunch.

Lighting
Maybe the biggest addition to the script are the three sliders (one for each side of the blocks; top, left & right) to adjust the amount of light falling on each side. This can be used both as a way to increase the contrast – like in the image below – as well as change the entire lighting direction.

Elevate
This function was actually included in the previous version but I’ll consider it new anyway. What this list does is to simply tell the script that either ‘Light’ or ‘Dark’ colors should be elevated. The script checks the brightness level of the sampled area and uses that value as a multiplier with the Max Height value. Therefore, as the ‘Light’ value is default, lighter blocks are rendered higher, of course the same happens with dark blocks if Elevate is set to ‘Dark’.

Draw Non-Elevated & Threshold
Having this option turned OFF when running the script with images with an overall uniform background can be useful to not draw blocks of limited height that would otherwise be drawn as a thin flat object. The accompanying Threshold value – enabled ONLY if Draw Non-Elevated is turned OFF – is the amount by how high a block needs to be in order to be drawn by the script. Note that the threshold is limited to values between zero and the Max Height value, the maximum threshold value will vary accordingly.

Outlines
I’ve also added an option to turn the outlines ON and OFF. Not very big enhancment as it is very easy to just turn of the stroke of all selected objects directly inside Illustrator but I thought this way was more convenient.