Eric Weeks - personal pages - computer-generated pictures Spot of spots

weeks/physics.emory.edu

Description

I got this idea from some paintings I saw in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. I basically created a 3D surface z(x,y) and drew a circle of size proportional to z. The picture was made using postscript and converted to GIF.

Here is the complete gawk script I used to create the picture:

#! /bin/sh

gawk '
BEGIN  {
	pi=3.14159265
	deg=pi/180
	scale=0.8
	windowx=18/scale
	windowy=22/scale

	print "%!PS-Adobe-1.0"
	print "gsave"
	print "matrix currentmatrix /originmat exch def "
	print "/umatrix {originmat matrix concatmatrix setmatrix} def "
	print "[28.3465 0 0 28.3465 10.5 100.0] umatrix"
	print "0 0 0 setgray"

	for (n=-5;n<40;n++)  {
		for (m=-40;m<40;m++)  {
			x = m+cos(60*deg)*n
			y = sin(60*deg)*n
			if ((x > 0)&&(y > 0)&&(x < windowx)&&(y < windowy))  {
				z = (x-4)*(x-10)+(y-10)*(y-10);
				z = (sin(z/30)+2)/3
				print x*scale+2,y*scale
				print z/2.8,0,360
				print "arc closepath fill"
			}
		}
	}
	print "showpage grestore"
}'

Links...

• Questions? Comments? Send me email; email address below.
• Research I do
• Other pictures I've made - quasicrystals, fractals, cellular automata, other things.
• Software I've written -- some functional, some fun
• Various simple algorithms for making simple pictures
• Graphics techniques (some used to make this picture)