Helio
Helio is my favorite and most expressive generative work yet with ambitious goals to display in realtime at large resolutions and print at super large scale. In my mind, the project succeeded on both accounts. The animation can be displayed on almost any device at any resolution. Only on high density displays over at resolutions well over 4k does the framerate begin to drop below 60. And the webapp is able to print out super high resolution still frames that can be used for print. For the prints below, I created prints at 300 dpi for panels up to 7 feet.
The variety of shapes and movement in both stills and animations is stunning. The generative color palettes adding many layers of recognition and surprise.
Following my prior works, Helio is a real time WebGL animation, inviting the viewers to watch and enjoy. It’s a slow consumption.
I was nspired by a prior work called Mischief Makers made by me in 2015.
Like Hyperion, Helio utilizes distance fields. I wanted to take the same spirit of Hyperion but apply the distance field in two dimensions rather than three to meet my inspiration and to return to master the basics of the technique I’ve been practicing for a couple years now.
Helio is a WebGL generative animation minted on demand using publicworks.art.
The algorithm produces some surprising outputs.
The Algorithm
The base of the Helio algorithm consists of randomly placed origins points. NFTs have between 5 and 15 origin points. The number of origins has a drastic affect on the final image not yet seen here.
By adding the kaleidoscope effect and moving origins around, a large variety of symmetric compositions are achieved.
By randomly moving the origins around the screen, and choosing a new keleidoscopic folding structure, we can already see a large difference in generated patterns.
Now that a basic structure is formed, color can be derived from the distance fields.
Using @iquilezles https://iquilezles.org/articles/palettes/ generative color palettes I can map personally curated color palettes to the distance field. Color also has a drastic affect on the output of the same distance field
The foreground builds on top of the background. The background is black in the following images. By masking pixels that are outside of a certain angle from the origin, shapes are achieved. These different mix styles are seen in trait.
Adding together with the background and modulating the angle by a trait, interesting symmetric patterns are discovered.
For the same structure, a different color palette produces a unique image.
