Programmer, Technical Artist, Generative Artist
Orbital Art
(Processing3)
I made these three programs in Processing3 one afternoon whilst working on my dissertation. I needed a break from the the heavy algorithms I was making, so I decided to spend my afternoon making a model solar system in processing. Shortly after starting this mini-project I started to get interested in the concentric rings being made and the relations between the orbital points. I made these three artefacts to highlight what caught my eye.
The Two Planets
I love the images generated by this program. They really blew my mind with the level of complexity and variety of structures, In some images you can see emergent shapes like circles, but even much more complicated shapes like cardioids and related mathematical structures.
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How it works: There are two "planets" which are both rotating around the centre, one is one arbitrary unit away from the centre and the second is double that of the first. Every frame the two planets rotate around the centre by their defined speed, their speed is defined as the amount of radians around the circle it should update. Then a line is drawn between the two planets. The planets speed is always in ratio to each other. When both planets return to the starting point on the same update, all future lines will just be re-drawing the existing lines, so the a picture is taken and stored in the data file, the canvas is reset and it goes on to the next set of speeds for the planets.
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All these different images are made with this process and different speeds for the two planets in different combinations. After a few groups of images, you start to notice different patterns and structures coming out, in different levels of detail. This is probably defined by the ratios of the velocities, rather than the magnitude of the velocities. The magnitude probably just defines the literally amount of lines drawn.
The Chains
When I was fiddling around with the data structures to sort out the hierarchy of planets orbiting stars and moons orbiting planets I took it a bit further, and ended up making a system of smaller nodes orbiting greater nodes in a recursive format. This allows each line of the hierarchy to go on for a near infinite length of nodes (what the program allows data wise).
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The individual chains and chain joints all use the same values for the angles of rotation, half of them are just inverted with a negative sign.
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In the program you can change the amount of links on the chains (how many joints/how long it is) as well as how many chains there are in the first place.
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You can see an ever changing and emerging lattice in this animated sculpture.
The Technicolour Chains
This is a modification of The Chains above. All the same controls are there, but you can also reset the positions, as well as randomise the colours of the nodes. There are no shown lines between the nodes, and they leave a trail.
