Pattern Filling

Starting with the non-overlapping circles and moving toward pattern filling, now in Scripting mode.

Here is the first brute-force non-overlapping circles Script.

Not very sophisticated. I just take random locations and put a circle of random size there and make sure the radius isn't larger than the distance to the closest existing sphere. Lots of extra needless circles this way without really filling up the space.

According to my measurements (External > Average) you've achieved 78.1% circle coverage.

Decent first effort.

The proper term is "circle packing". I just Googled "circle packing" and landed right on Quasimondo's Flickr images.

(Whatever happened to Quasimondo anyways? Haven't heard of him since 2008.)

The proper circle packing algorithms seem quite complex.

Just giving the circles some space around them makes it look better.

I finally read up on anti-aliasing zones and implemented it, so I don't have to set the antialiasing to "all pixels".

Some improvements. A new circle is added to the table only if it is a valid circle (no overlap, above minimum size), so 600 circles fill the image in better than 2000 totally random circles did.

The index number is now used for shading as well (combined with an 5-color gradient and an elevation gradient).

I have one problem: For the life of me I can't seem to be able to handle getting out of the while-loop when the pattern is "full". So it just throws an error when I increase the "Number of circles" slider above the point where the pattern is full. (by "full" I mean when 100 consecutive attempts to place a new circle fail.)

WOW!!!! W O W !!! You are a genius ThreeDee, you have done a really great, nice and good work!! I like much what you have done until now.

AWESOME!

Nice!

With my luck, this feature will be included in the next beta version of V4...

By the way, here's a question. When sampling the color, are you deriving the mean or median? :o

Very cool, Threedee! Great that you took this challenge up!
I guess once you got it all working properly it could be any shape, not just circles?

Maximum circle size variation gives a fractal-like look.

Ok, pretty good. But now let's go back to basics.

The packing density achieved with the current method is fairly good.

Now, the math necessary to achieve that is way too complex for my taste, so here's my simplified approach/theory which should give a relatively good result:

Take two connected circles in the center and start drawing circles which touch the previous circle and the lowest available index circle filling in the space in clockwise direction.

Should be simple to implement and should give a good result.

The only foreseeable problem is what to do if the shape grows itself into an internal dead-end. So there needs to be an excape route when the next circle cannot be added in this wise.

Nice, well done and interesting this two examples you have made





Of course that this can´t be compared to the very tight and very compressed and VERY packed circles like this other example



BUT I think that although this is better, your example are not in bad at all, and are just different way, and I agree that surely to be able to make this very compact and tight packing would involve much more complex math and a different algorithm.

Please, continue your great work and keep getting it better and better

Awesome, Quasimondo has returned! Welcome back!

I love your implementations of circle packing, especially the flavor of fitting them into the largest available space.

Lua will be a piece of cake for you.

TD

Please, any information update of this amazing and awesome filter project?

Is ThreeDee missing again? The last message is from 26 October, one month ago, and in this thread was in september 18 and now we are in November 26.

What ThreeDee have done here looks really nice and well done and does not necessarily need to be like the Quasimondo examples, I like it already just as the examples available above from ThreeDee

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ddaydreams It looked promising I hope something good will come fr om the effort.

I wish and hope that too, although I think that he has already got it right as it is now, as the image of the FF Lionfish is already well done as shown here.

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ddaydreams In the mean time I use peculator on my iphone

YES!! The Percolator App for Iphone or Ipad is really excellent and amazing what it can do.

Although the problem with it is that is limited to a resolution of 2048 x 2048, and here in filter forge would not have a lim it, BUT you can use the "Live Trace" or "Image trace" of Adobe Illustrator or from Corel Draw and convert it to vector (it seems that it works very well) and then you can have the percolated image in ANY resolution you want.

PERCOLATOR USED THE WAY OF THREEDEE AND NOT FROM QUASIMONDO

ThreeDee wanted to get to the level of very tight circle packing that Quasimondo have shown in his beautiful and wonderful examples, BUT it seems that this is more complex than it seems, and so others app available, like Percolator is using the more separate and less space filling as shown already by ThreeDee in the examples above and it looks very nice too anyway.

I have not yet found any information related to the very tight and compressed circle packing that Quasimondo have shown and is using, and do not know how he has done it, perhaps is a own special programmed software made by himself or using something like the Processing language to make his own algorithm.

so... well aside from our established group, anybody doing actual research on how this effect is achieved properly?

Might be interesting to see it implemented with this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halton_sequence

That's probably the most direct manner, though given the fact that it's a pretty set thing, you don't have many choices for alternative design attempts.

ThreeDee's approach is actually kinda neat. If done right, you probably don't need trig because each circle is being drawn in a spiral form. So given the first x radius, draw the next circle next to it, and spiral outwards = probably a nice clean method.

//unrelated to filterforge....

On a totally unrelated FilterForge note... here's something I did a while ago. Colors derived from image. Self homework = make it fully original without deriving bits and pieces of code from everywhere.

Processing.

Hey guys, I came across this cool 3DS Max plugin that does this in 3D!
https://sites.google.com/site/autofill21/gallery

It's written in python, but it's open-source! Maybe similar methods could be applied to FF lua.

If you may be interested in circle packing in 3D (sphere packing) I have found some time ago this very good and interesting tutorial for Cinema 4D --> Some kind of Sphere Packing in 3D

It shows how to make the sphere be packed in the tighest and closer one to each other in a dynamic way.

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ddaydreams Skybase, what app did you do that in?

Skybase is using the Processing scripting language and if you want to have more information you can see this other thread with further links to know what it is about.

SpaceRay, provided that tutorial, all you need to do is just add a repelling factor to each instance of a sphere. You can then turn up the ambient color and get flat-shaded circles for output. Cinema also allows you to sample colors based on image input. Pretty sure I remember I did that so the shader setup might be confusing but the actual process shouldn't be difficult.