Fractal Chaos – Dachi Tarughishvili – Assignment 2

I remember watching video by numberphile called Chaos Game years ago which I found very intriguing.  I wanted to create a generative art illustration around that topic something that would involve Fractals and creating order out of randomness. Fortunately, I found Daniel Shiffman’s video regarding Chaos Game where I followed his tutorial for the initial version of the project which draws Sierpinski triangle.

Even this simple configuration of Chaos game is surprisingly beautiful and very interesting as we have created triangle shaped forms simply by drawing points halfway to one of the three random points that is randomly created and then selected.

Next step was to add more complexity to the project, thereby adding more seed points and refactoring whole thing to make changing variables for future reference more dynamic. Tutorial was very helpful in achieving this. To be more precise, I had two values which I could dynamically change: percent (the distance to a randomly chosen point where new point has to be placed at) and const n which is basically number of seed points.

I could make a very lengthy post talking about each aspect of the code but instead I want to highlight the code I am most proud of and rest I will either explain in class or you can see through embedded comments of P5 sketch.

for (let i = 0; i < 200; i++) {
    
    strokeWeight(1);
    stroke(255, 255, 255, 200);
    
    let neighborIndex;
    do {
      neighborIndex = floor(random(points.length)); //from array
    } while (neighborIndex === previousVertexIndex || neighborIndex === (previousVertexIndex + 1) % points.length || neighborIndex === (previousVertexIndex - 1 + points.length) % points.length);
    let next = points[neighborIndex];

    current.x = lerp(current.x, next.x, percent);
    current.y = lerp(current.y, next.y, percent);
    
    point(current.x, current.y);
    
    previousVertexIndex = neighborIndex;
  }
}

This is an additional condition I added to make it so that newly chosen point can’t be the same as the old point or a neighboring point from the polygon. We are using LERP (linear interpolation) for updating position.

In the future, I could possibly experiment with more shapes and more drawings and users are also welcome to modify the code and play with it. Perhaps, adding a slider would make things much more fun to play with parameters. Additionally introducing color, or an interactive element users can play with could potentially be more captivating. For now, I am including the project with parameters of the shape I liked the most, but we can try other ones in class. I really liked making this project and I hope you like it too.