Circle/Diamond Packing by Rico

Circle/Diamond Packing by Rico
http://www.filterforge.com/filters/16093.html

Interesting filter.

Thanks for posting it.

Hi SpaceRay, thank you for your kind comments.

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Sorry that I could not open myself yet the filter as it is for FF 11

I think you could easily edit the .ffxml file to change the FF version - the filter does not rely on any particularly new features.

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Does this have a possible relations with this other comments from ThreeDee made in this Unit component thread ?

I don't think so, no. The loops ThreeDee is talking about are quite different I think.

As for filling the circles with images - I think that would not be too difficult to achieve - I think you could probably edit the render code to call in pixels from other sources. The images would have to fit within the boundaries of the circles or diamonds.

Hi SpaceRay,

I understand what you're after but I don't have the time to do this I'm afraid. If you want to do this yourself then you will need to learn some coding I think. The code required is not that complex and you can build on the filter as it exists to get to where you want - it's just the rendering code that need to change.

Since writing the filter I have expanded on it a good deal for myself to create generative images not based on an input image. I got some great results that I really liked, but I could not get FilterForge to go as far as I wanted it to because of it's timeout issues, which the user/developer has no control over.

So I did some digging around in google and discovered a fantastic platform I had not yet heard of called Processing. I ported the Lua code from my filter into Java in Processing and since then I have not touched the filter version as the Processing version can provide so much more performance. I am happy to supply you with the Processing code for circle packing if you like.

There are some really great tutorial videos available for Processing by one of the authors that will teach you coding from scratch.

I still love FilterForge, but for this object packing task I prefer to use Processing as it gives me the performance I need - for example I am able to build a 6000 x 4000 image and fill it with 20000 polygons (of 30 different types) in 25 seconds. Polygon packing is several orders more processor-intensive than circle packing, so I am really pleased with this performance. It means I can do so much more trial and error to get to the images I want.

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Rico wrote: I understand what you're after but I don't have the time to do this I'm afraid. If you want to do this yourself then you will need to learn some coding I think

Thanks very much and is much appreciated the long and detailed explanation

Sorry that I can not not learn some coding and of course I understand that you can modify this and there is no problem is only of course if you wanted and could do it

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Rico wrote: So I did digging around in google and discovered a fantastic platform I had not yet heard of called Processing. I ported the Lua code from my filter into Java in Processing and since then I have not touched the filter version as the Processing version can provide so much more performance.

I really know since 10 years ago the awesome and amazing Processing software that is really very powerful and full of potential in the same way as filter forge BUT I have never been able to use it because it is all based on coding and unless you already have the code already written I do not know how to use it, and is true that it has much more performance

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Rico wrote: I am happy to supply you with the Processing code for circle packing if you like

Yes, please, I would be great and happy if you can send the code that you already have made and I can try and see if I can use it . If you want you can put it here replacing the .pde extension with the .ffxml extension so you can upload here

Here is a post I made in 2012 about finding what Processing.org could do buy regrettably could not use it

Processing generative art thread from 2012

@SpaceRay this is also a fantastic resource for starting out coding in Processing: https://happycoding.io/tutorials/processing/

In the previous example there is really much empty space between the circles because of the values given but if you change the values to the following

float mindist = 0.05; // minimum distance between circles
float edge_distance = 25; // distance from edge of image
float minrad = 5; // minimum size
float maxrad = 500; // maximum size
int ellipse_count = 35000; // number of item to try to make

it will really show the real power of the script to do true perfect circle packing

In the console is put that the count is 35000 but created 15072, so does this mean that it only created 15.072? because I think that it could not fit more circles according to the minimum and maximum size given

Apart from the Processing option above given by Rico that is still has no image possible inside the circles, emme has been able to do it in FF

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emme wrote: I made an attempt at circle packing a few years back. The code was ported from Processing if I remember correctly. It has a couple of different output modes that give it some flexibility - for mapping images and stuff. Should be able to do what you're talking about SpaceRay.

Thanks very much for sharing this and showing how to apply the image over gradient circles.

YES! you are right, this is just the thing I wanted to have in FF and it seems to work right and well and looks really cool

Although is not a big problem and I like how it is now, I find that this does not fit all the circles inside the available space (as it happens correctly shown in the above example with processing) and some are circles are cropped, I do not know if it would be possible in some way, it would be really good if optionally you could also make that all circles fit inside the available space, although maybe it could be difficult to do

Here is an example I have just made with default values but with 10.000 FF Lionfish it looks very well done the good packing done

Oh, and in case you want to use non-square images, just change lines 43 and 47 to:

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elseif circle.x + circle.r > sizex then elseif circle.y + circle.r > sizey then

And the best of all is that you can switch to IMAGES that replaces the circles !!

Here is the same with 10.000 lionfish and it works really great

Thanks very much to emme for sharing the filter showing how the images can replace the gradients and I will try myself to use the same technique and trick with this great filter by Rico in this thread to add the gradients and so be able to have the awesome results of this filter with images replacing the plain colors, so you can have the option to have the beauty of the original source colors or the image or optionally replace them with small images filling the dots.

Thanks both Rico and emme for making this possible.