POV Glyphs

It seems to me that there is a general class of images out there that might look nice: an underlying grid of points, some represented as dots, some connected by lines to neighbours. My original glyph idea was restricted to all nodes being connected to a maximum of one other node, and small, so it looks something like an alphabet.

But there are lots of generalizations: allow nodes to be connected to more than one site, draw in 3d, colour parts of the glyph differently, etc. This is just the sort of thing POV-Ray is good at. I cooked up a program to generate random POV-Ray glyphs with various rules, then started exploring the space of options. If you're interested in the program, send me some mail.

A few images

Here's some images - thumbnails are linked to a larger GIF. I'm still playing with the ideas, and hope to do some more. I want to experiment with making the textures on the individual components nicer, maybe use a two colour motif where the varied colouring is part of the design. I'd also like to take a crack at generating random graphs with no cycles, they can look nice.

So I'm not done, but I've made a few things that look ok. Please forgive the cheesy spotty texture, I wanted something interesting there and this was easy. I'm also sorry they're only 8 bit images: if Netscape supported PNG, I wouldn't use GIFs here.

First image I created, this one done by hand. I think this has nice balance: a few images like this could make for an interesting font. 3x4 is probably a better size, though.

Basic rule I designed the software for: draw random spheres, then draw random connections making sure no node is connected to more than one other node.

A variant, much like the previous. It seems to me that on a big grid like this it looks better to not have any spaces. Maybe balance is just harder to obtain randomly.

Pushing the same rule to really big grids. I think this one looks a bit silly, but that's ok.

Now apply the rule to three dimensions, also making the density of objects sparser. I was hoping this would be interesting, but it's just too confusing. This is something I've learned: a rule that gives interesting patterns in 2d usually looks bad in 3d. It's just too hard to see 3d on a flat image, you need to be able to move the object around.

I've been starting to play with different rules: this one draws random spheres first, then draws random connections, but allows connections to be made to existing connections (but not spheres, so the spheres stick around). I think this image has good balance, too.

Here's another 3d image. This time each connected component is coloured randomly. The thumbnail here links to a gzipped .FLI file, an animation (1 meg) of the cube tumbling so you can get an idea what it looks like. xanim is a good Unix .FLI viewer.