Develop a programme based on drawing instructions

[raphuu]

[I posted the same topic in Help & Support, but I dunno if it's the right place, so I post it here too. ]

Hi folks,

I am a visual artist. I have been following this forum since the Mandelbulb story with great interest.

Lately, I have been experimenting with some procedural drawings with a compass which lead to, imho as a non-mathematician/programmer, a kind of fractal (examples attached). I am looking for a way to put it into algorithms so that a software can draw it. I'll be happy if someone could help me on that or at least tell me if it is feasible or not.

thank you!






To produce it, it goes like this:

On a sheet of paper,

Initialisation:

chose an arbitrary initial point.
chose an arbitrary radius
trace an arc of arbitrary length (but > than 180°; thanks Schlega) .

Iteration (first one):

Open the compass to the length between the two ends of the first arc.
put the spike of the compass on one end of the first arc (new center).
trace the second arc. its length is defined by the line of the first one, i.e. the line acts as hard boundary.

Iteration (rest):

Open the compass to the length between the two ends of the last arc.
put the spike of the compass on the end of the last arc which is closer to the center of the very first arc.
trace a new arc. its length is defined by the line of the other, already drawn, ones. when several possibilities exist, trace where there is the most place, i.e where you can draw the longer line.

Remarques:
1) if the line goes out of the sheet of paper and cannot come back in again, its length is taken from the border of the sheet.
2) if the line goes out of the sheet of paper and can come back in again, then the missing part of the arc is taken into consideration when looking for the longer line possible.

[Schlega]

I'm not sure I understand the first iteration. If the initial arc is less than 180^o, do you just get a circle around that arc and the process terminates?

[raphuu]

Very good point!

In all my tryings, i guess i always had an initial arc bigger than 180°. So it's not that arbitrary. i'll edit the original post.

Thank you!

[raphuu]

Hi,

I reactivate this post with some more info:

I've experimented a little with a plugin for Adobe Illustrator called Scriptographer. I'm aware that this is a little alien to the tools used by the members of this forum, but it's what i found handier.

It allows to used javascript to pass commands to illustrator. But my problem seems to involve serious trigonomy skills, which even with my highschool math books at hand, are pretty difficult for me.

So i've drawn "by hand" a better version of the kind of result i'd like to have. it's "iterated" about a hundred times.

The main problem is to find a good way to express all the n-1 iterations, in order to figure out what is the longer arc i can draw.

I've posted on this thread on the scriptographer forum.
They have the knowledge for scripting issues, ie what function are available, but not exactly the trigonomy and fractal iteration science i probably need to achieve this project.

I pretty much welcome all kind of hints putting me on good tracks. I'm very open too to any kind of collaboration.

Thank you very much for your help.