BARCODE BONANZA

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THE FUTURE MR CITY PLANNER?

Some days ago I found a paper entitled ‘Procedural modelling of cities‘ written by Parish and Müller (creators of CityEngine), and was reminded of Introversion‘s game-in-progress Subversion.Procedural generated cities produce some rather interesting patterns so I started to look around for more code and found the Suicidator City Generator, a free Python script for Blender.

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TILE TOY: NEW FEATURE

I have just spent the morning adding a new feature to my Tile Toy script called Sparsity. I can now control how dense the pattern will be by telling the tool to favor empty tiles – or at least tiles with no connection – by a certain percentage.

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FONTICON

I’ve always been impressed by those colorful patterns produced by Kapitza. It’s nothing shy of genius creating a set of geometric fonts and then just type to your hearts content.

The idea of making something, preferably complex, out of a limited set of rules, principles or objects is very appealing to me. It’s like art sprung out of (almost) nothingness. It’s called synergy – when the sum is greater than its parts. I think these patterns adresses just that; very simple and mundane geometric shapes, but put together, they create something more with seemingly infinte possibilities of variation.

Now, I thought about this for a while, wondering if I had the patience to construct my own symbols and shapes and turn them into a working font, I finaly decided I had not. What would be the point, it’s been done already. Although, I had one concern, as all these symbols where made as fonts there isn’t a very intuitive way to rotate a symbol or flip it around its own axis. Sure, it isn’t that hard to flip a character around, but say if there are a 1000 different symbols it becomes time consuming and counterproductive.

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VECTORASTER

Just updated this wonderful program to version 4.

Vectorraster 4 by Lost Minds is a great tool for anyone who wants to create beautiful vector-based rasters in all kinds of ways. It is user-friendly and allow for alot of experimentations by using text or custom shapes as raster dots. Well worth its $25 (Mac only) if you like to fiddle around with halftones.

A COMBINATION OF SCRIPTS

I have recently added some functions to two of my scripts; aMaze and the Tile Toy. The maze script can now save it’s wall data to a file which allows me to use it inside my Tile Toy script creating mazes with a completely different look. The appearance of the maze is now totally based on what kind of tiles I create within Tile Toy.

At the moment it only supports ‘single file’ tiles therefore only five tiles are needed (since it is a perfect maze it has no need for a solitary tile). Actually that number is closer to four, as a four-way intersection seems to be very rarely used.

TILE TOY

Finally my new script works! The idea was to make a script that would, out of limited number of tiles, create seemingly infinite variations of map- or roadlike patterns. The tiles needs some rules in order to pair them up so I drew some temporary lines representing roads just to make it easier to understand [more…]