[MacTuitui]

I've been doing this since ages, so these's a lot of intuition going on, and I've a quite significant list of sketches at this point, so I personally start with a lot of convenient tools already.

To learn about the different techniques and mostly to get to know the basics I cannot recommend enough the amazing Daniel Shiffman ( https://twitter.com/shiffman/ ) and his awesome "The Coding Train" video series on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/shiffman

I usually do not release the code for my dailies, but I'm getting a few of them ready to include as examples for nannou, there's a PR with one example already up. I'm also always open to talk about the "how" I did something and to give you a pseudo-code version of what I'm using.

[uglycoyote]

Excellent. I found the PR and was able to run it, I think that will make a good starting point for experimentation.

I'm a game developer so pretty experienced with rendering but not so much with Rust, Vulcan, etc and haven't done a lot of this 2D "demoscene" sort of stuff, so I don't know all the neat tricks there., and it is not immediately obvious what kind of techniques you use to get the cool results that you are getting.

I had a look through some of the existing examples in nannou (under the generative_design folder) but found the existing ones to be extremely uninteresting. Your PR is a great non-trivial example with inspiring results.

Your instragram feed makes these all seem like beautiful mysterious artwork. It love it if there was a "making of" blog which described your thought process going from one to the next, as I imagine you aren't rewriting them each from scratch but making small tweaks on an existing idea each time.

I checked out the Coding Train, there is such a wide range of content there, was there a particular episode that inspired a lot of these designs?

[MacTuitui]

I wrote a bit about the process here: https://medium.com/@mactuitui

As for the coding train, there's a few examples where I actually got directly inspired: the fluid simulation was a great one as I was always afraid that this might be too much work; this showed me I could actually do it in a day (but be vary that that his particular implementation has a few bugs).

If I look at one recent example, maybe raycasting is interesting. How would I make that look nice? Maybe I'll start by having a simple scene with a few regular walls but a circle of point sources that would rotate in a loop. Maybe I'll find a way to make the walls move in an interesting fashion. Or have the rays propagate through time and have a contest of flashing lights.

But what Daniel is good at is explaining some of the techniques used behind this type of work, it is not about the "how to make it look cool".

Now that I think of it, there's one thing that might be fun to do is to work though Casey Reas's Process series (linked here: http://reas.com/text ). It's a set of "elements" that have predefined behavior (but described as text) and a set of "rules" to represent how those elements interact. There's a lot of freeway since it's text; you might find something interesting by yourself here.

The point is that there is no right or wrong way to do things here, it's mostly a matter of "does it look good". That requires to think about all the points that make art look good, so you'll have to think about contrast, balance, composition and everything. But having something to show is half the battle/

The particular example in the PR is indeed based on the previous days before, there is a lot of overlap in the techniques used and it can be pretty opaque to understand but at its core it's a system that generates a tree by making elements grow/branch out according to some "energy" that is coming from the root (iirc). The other half of the issue is how to make this process look good.