This will, no doubt, be the biggest undertaking – with regards to the complexity of the code required – I’ve done to date so there will probably be a lot more posts around this topic in the future as this was more of a mission statement than anything else.

Jared Tarbell’s homepage Complexification is another page I had found earlier. He has made some amazing scripts using Processing and his random line, water color script very much resembles a huge city viewed from above.Anyway, I threw myself head-over-heels into this undertaking and spent two nights trying to make my own city generator and came up with this.Now, I must say that it looks fairly satisfying but it only works a fraction of the times I run it and I have no control over any of the parameters I should be able to control such as population density, map type (raster, radial or a mix of the two), road curvature, road classes and their potential to spawn new branches.

As in Introversion’s Subversion I guess that I would have to make use of some complex L-system but that is a little too much above my competence level, for the moment.

The Saville Raster was the first script I wrote for Scriptographer, though I have to admit that I had alot of help from a friend.

The idea wasn’t my own. Jürg Leni, creator of the Scriptographer plugin, had commissioned a script, called Faust, that produced this effect for an artist and the script wasn’t published on the site. Alot of people in the forum had expressed a desire for this script and I thought that if the Faust script couldn’t be released due to some reason or other that wouldn’t stop me from posting my own version. I really liked it too and figured that this couldn’t be all that hard to do so I sat down with a friend, with a much higher understanding of javascript than me, and started scripting.

It didn’t take long and the result was very satisfying and really sparked a new interest in trying to use Illustrator as a tool for more procedurally generated art/design, such as Processing or NodeBox/NodeBox 2. I named it Saville Raster after its strong resemblance of Peter Saville’s iconic album cover for Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures.

Unfortunately, just a day or two after posting the script, I was contacted by Jürg who felt, although glad I had started using Scriptographer, obliged to remove the script. We exchanged some mails and sorted it all out.

If anything, I felt kind of flattered by the whole thing.