Before entering the Alps, the top riders pretty much followed each other - except for the extraordinary rides of  Sylvain Chavanel who managed to get the yellow jersey twice in the first week. Full size screenshot here.

But, as many say, the race doesn’t start until we hit the mountains - and this year certainly wasn’t any different. After the insane stages this weekend the riders have now been scattered all over the graph. Full size screenshot here.

I still have a bunch of things I’d like to add in before releasing the app for you to play with, hopefully a few more evenings here and there should get it to a state of alpha release worthiness! Watch this space.

This brings me to Delaunay (and of course, Voronoi - but I’ll get to that in more detail in another post).

Jonathan Puckey has been making amazing work with Jürg Lehni’s Illustrator plugin Scriptographer. In particular I have been (for a while now) fascinated with the Delaunay Portraits series. With a custom Scriptographer script, you can create simplified renderings of an underlying image.

So I built the ‘Puckey Portrait Machine’ in Processing.

I wanted to understand the dynamics of the Delaunay-Voronoi relationship and I wanted to learn to control it - there’s a certain beauty in exploring mathematics from a naive standpoint, poking at it, changing variables adding bits to see if it breaks. I still do this some times. But in this learning exercise I wanted to gain control and be specific.

I made it a point to try and hit Puckey’s style and aesthetic as close as I could to ensure I was harnessing the mathematics correctly (and not just blindly creating some random, accidental experiment). So far the software has two main drawing modes.

Manual Drawing

In this mode, you manually place each point with the mouse, this adds the control needed to get to the aesthetics that Jonathan Puckey has in his work, and this was my initial aim.

Following this, I wanted to experiment with more automated renderings, so I wrote a mode to automatically fill the screen with points. This saves a lot of mouse clicking, but complete takes away the ability to control the output. As expected a series of random points on a screen are distributed fairly evenly which results in a muddy and not too interesting result.

Automated Drawing

I wanted to have the ability to add more detail to certain places of the geometry while keeping the overall randomly generated state mesh. This would allow me to add detail to iconic parts of the face, like eyes and lips.

Adding Detail

All of these can of course be exported out as Illustrator vector files and printed in huge formats and in such, they very much relate to the original software piece by Puckney.

See the full list of contributors on the book website.

Here’s the abstract:

“A preferred contact group centric interface for a communication device can be used to facilitate communications by a user. The user interface can be arranged to activate from a user’s “home page” on the display, from an idle screen that is accessed after a timeout period expires, or any other appropriate mechanism that activates the preferred contact group centric experience. A user selects the preferred contact group from among an array of the user’s contacts. Once the contact group is configured, a minimal number of navigation/selection features is necessary to activate any number of communication modes available to the contacts. The contact group is configured such that simple and quick navigation between the contact members is achieved. The contact group can be presented in 2D and 3D arrangements, in any number of list or geometric configurations.”

And here is the link to the full patent on the US Patent and Trademark office website. Usually Google Patents have a nicer version (where the images are inserted and you the horrible layout of the USPTO website can be avoided) but it doesn’t seem to be up yet. However, here is the UK patent on Google Patents.

I’ve also started adding a bit of volume to the ribbons which comes out nicely when rendered in Modo using an HDR map as lighting. I’m really trying to limit the amount of tweaks I do in Modo but I wanted to push for a ‘plastique fantastique’ look for this so soft edges and HDR was an obvious choice. Here’s the latest iteration of renderings.

First I simply let the ribbons flow around the sphere with long tails….

The output seemed a bit sterile and boring so I added some noise to ribbons heads and allowed them to pause mid-flight (before forming the sphere).

(screengrab from Modo)

And here’s the rendering…

Look, it’s the flying spaghetti monster!

It’s tempting to spend too much time tweaking lights / materials / camera settings in Modo with too little focus on the code generating the shapes - oh well, it was an evening well spent getting my head around linking beginShape(TRIANGLE_STRIP) with Modo’s wonderful rendering engine