lordof x gen.art

ARCANE

Primitive Bending Structures

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THE ORIGINS

The Inspiration and design procedures

The initial inspiration of the Arcane series is primitive shapes, and how primitive shapes can be entangled into a single piece to form a bigger composition, quoting Aristotle:

"Total is greater than the sum of its parts"

I was intrigued by the idea that something simple and seemingly insignificant, like a single primitive shape, and specifically rectangles, could be transformed and elevated when combined with other shapes to create something complex and intricate. This idea formed the foundation for the collection, and guided the design methodology as I explored ways to combine and manipulate primitive shapes to create dynamic compositions.

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As I developed the collection, I experimented with different techniques and approaches for combining and manipulating the primitive shapes. Color and shading were used to create depth and dimensionality. Repetition and rotations were also used to create patterns and rhythms. Distortion and textures, to create movement and change. These techniques allowed me to create artworks that were not only visually different, but also interactive and dynamic. Each piece in the series is influencing and shaping the others. This goes in hand with the post-drop mechanics I want to introduce.

This is where I found the name of the collection: Arcane. In literature, the word "arcane" is often used to describe knowledge or information that is hidden or secret, and is often associated with themes of mystery and magic. It is typically used in fantasy and science fiction literature to refer to magical, otherworldly powers or abilities that are known only to a select few. To quote Aristotle again:

"The arcane is not something to be feared, but embraced. It is the key to understanding the mysteries of the universe, and to unlocking the full potential of our minds and hearts."

From idea to implementation, Arcane is the result of several months, iterations and my first long-form and entangled generative art project on the Ethereum blockchain.

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the process

At a high level, the Arcane series is created with Javascript and the p5.js framework in WEBGL mode, leveraging one texture shader. For the overall step-by-step process, let's abstract the rendering animations and other mechanics and focus on the core operations:

step by step

The first step is divided by 4 sub-steps that are described as follow:

  • A number of grids to draw is chosen between 1 and 7. Each grid is created with a number of rows and columns following the sequence of Fibonacci numbers.

  • A custom strategy for density (how much the grid is filled) is set, alongside a strategy for ordering the grids (order in which grids are drawn).

  • A palette and custom coloring strategy is chosen (colors can be chosen based on hue proximity, vertical, horizontal and center gradients, or based on layered noise).

  • Lastly, each grid has a texture for its shapes (BLOCK, LINES, GRADIENT, NOISE_GRAD or SKETCH).

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Each grid is also assigned several other strategies on how to alter the points in terms of size, density and position. Furthermore, each grid has a specific rotation and flag to indicate if shapes can overlap and builds itself greedily trying to fill a desirable density. After each grid is built, it is scaled to the canvas dimensions and it begins drawing points by batches in the render loop until all grids are completely drawn.

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The last step is to apply a texture shader to the overall composition in order to add fine details to the piece and simulate a more aged look. Warping is also applied to the pieces with 75% probability, as it propagates the primitives more freely on the canvas adding a sense of flow and openness.

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A big part of the rendering of Arcane is the rendering process we initially abstracted. For the pieces having warping, a strategy is chosen to animate the rendering. FINAL means that warping will occur at any of all the grids being drawn. PROGRESSIVE does an easeIn interpolation between sketch progress and warping applied. STEPS is simulating a piecewise function and draws that in random steps. Finally, STOCHASTIC random jumps the [0, 1] space and smoothly reaches the final warping state.

As the system leverages the shader for texturing and not for all the shapes drawing, there are a lot of points to draw. Therefore it grows linearly with the canvas size, so I applied a few optimizations to make the rendering faster. I am using generator functions to avoid storing the points and then drawing them. To make it even faster, I batch these generators by batches of 4000 points as I found this sweet spot to have a still nice rendering speed and FPS while being fast enough to not take long to draw the piece. Render times started at more than 5 minutes and went down to 1-3 minutes.

There are of course more details and random parameters to the algorithm but I removed them from here to ensure simplicty and clarity.

about me

LORDOF is a generative artist oscillating between Paris and Madrid. He graduated with a software engineering and machine learning degree and was always drawn to generative art in the past few years. It was only after graduating that he started to get out of his comfort zone and started creating art. Although relatively new to the field, he is constantly learning and expanding his knowledge, and skills and is always curious to try different blends of techniques. He wants his work to be characterized by a unique perspective and a willingness to take risks, and openly be interpreted and connected to technology in a way that pushes the boundaries of what is possible in generative art. His work is for now shaped by simple primitives, contrasted colours and various distortions applied with shaders. His favourite quote is: "It's always day one."

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CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license applies.