weeknotes: grackle, grain

bird.rs

I picked up the grackle work again in bird.rs. I finally had an excuse to rewrite the code where the head connects to the beak: I had made it so that the beak intersects the head’s arc, and that intersection determines where the head ends. For whatever reason, this calculation was inconsistent, and the part of the forehead connecting to the beak would sometimes disappear. I had worked around it before by attaching a little Bezier curve.

With the longer grackle head, the circle for the head doesn’t really intersect with the beak in the same way as it did for the robin, goldfinch, and swift. Soo, I threw out the arc intersection completely, and now have bezier curves connecting the beak to the head. You can adjust the angle of how those curves connect to the beak.

grain.rs

Continuing on the research from last week, I’ve been thinking of a sketch based on rocks, where different things solidify at different angles, out of different materials… This week, I built a simple system that connects points with their neighbors, and then simulates some physics to keep the neighbors at a certain distance and at a certain angle.

Even with that, I start getting some nice distributions of points.

Next, I thought about grains in metals, where different grains reflect more light at different angles. I’m thinking about smoothing this out and then pen plotting something with it.