sin waves in blue and brown

Making the sin waves obvious.

Hot palette

Diamond shapes

Holes

There are two frequencies involved here. Call them x and y. When one is much larger than the other you get horizontal or vertical waves. If they are nearly equal you can see both types of waves.

Vertical waves in two colors. Playing with the direction and density.

In this variation the colors are not blended. Where they would otherwise overlap, one color is selected, rather than trying to blend them.

For the nerds out there, the bug was one of those kind of bugs. Internally I represent each color channel by a (continuous) floating point value between 0 and 1. The graphics hardware and the bitmap file format uses (discrete) byte values between 0 and 255. So one must multiply or divide by 256, depending on direction, for conversion. At one point I wrote 255 instead of 256. I looked at that number many times and it did not occur to me that it was wrong. The small difference is barely noticeable.

Small tweaks to the parameters, and added a black stripe to the vertical palette.

I had put in several parameters to fine tune the results. While the results were close to my intent, the parameters did not work as I expected. Sometimes I liked the unintended results. But mostly it was frustration trying to get better control over the finer details.

Here are multiple overlapping horizontal waves with slightly different frequency, amplitude, and phase. (Meaning they do not neatly line up.)

My code had a bug, and I spend way too much time hunting it down. In the process I generated many images trying to isolate the problem.

Actually there were two problems. One was an actual bug, the other probably should be called a prototype. I had an idea of what I wanted, wrote some code that I thought might work, but I was not sure. So I tried it to see what would happen. The result was close to, but not quite what I intended.

Anyway, I imagine that someday I will find a way to use these, with much reduced contrast, as background, and then put something to serve as a focal point in the foreground.

There is a lot of room between those two extremes, here are I few I feel are close to the middle.

Nature abounds with good examples. I am not trying to reproduce nature per se, but rather the abstraction of an interplay between random and not random.

The images could be a polished marble surface. I enjoy looking at the shapes and grain in stone and wood and similar surfaces. The patterns on a similar faux surface hold my interest only until I see where they repeat, then disappointment, as I can never not see the repetition again.

So, what about these pictures?

I used simple things like lines to test my anti-alias code changes. When that was looking good I wanted a more complex example like a fractal. A fractal with a lot of details takes a while to generate, so I decided to look for something simpler and quicker. This is the result.

If you put the previous image side by side with this one you will see the difference that anti-aliasing makes. This one uses a simple average on four point on grid within a pixel. In sub-pixel coordinated, the sample points are (0.25, 0.25), (0.25,0.75), (0.75,0.25) and (0.75, 0.75).