I especially like how Lens conveys the illusion of multiple overlapping lenses that appear to contort the coloration of the underlying circles, which is done by scaling and multiplying the underlying noise field. Built on a system of circles and rings, Caleb makes use of an underlying noise field for a nifty creative effect.

Note that the images shown here (2000x2000px) don't do the originals justice which are absolutely gigantic (16000x16000px). Here's two stunning artworks from Caleb Ogg:Ĭaleb's pieces Lens 3 and Colorshift 2, part of his ongoing 'Coalesce' series, are some of the most interesting circle packing sketches I've seen in a while. I'd like to show off a few artworks that have in one another or another been made with packing algorithms. Hence gen-art packing algorithms vary a little in that regard. We also often don't start with shapes that have a pre-determined size (usually real life objects have a pre-determined size duh), but make them up on the go. In generative art the primary goal of packing algorithms is often the creation of visually pleasing and interesting packing patterns. Packing is a heavily researched area of mathematics and fairly advanced algorithms have been developed to solve different variations of it. Packing algorithms are useful for a range of real life scenarios, such as packing boxes in a warehouse, or positioning shapes on a sheet of laser cutting material such that the amount of wasted material is minimised. I just find it incredibly interesting though, I keep finding myself coming back to this problem thinking: 'Surely this can't be this difficult!' I wrote a little about what this means here, understanding this is not necessary for what follows however. Despite its deceptive simplicity, bin packing is actually an NP-Hard problem, with it's associated decision problem (checking if the items to be packed fit in a certain area), is NP-Complete. Packing problems come in various flavours, but generally their overarching concern is positioning items as densely as possible within a given area.

A closer look at Tarwin's Circle Packing Library.

Go check out the folks mentioned above, they're all awesome creative individuals! Discussion: I had a thorough look at Tarwin's beautifully written packing library, and a lot of the code in later sections of this post are based on Tarwin's method. Later on I also re-discovered Tarwin Stroh-Spijer's fruit salad packing sketch, which initially evolved from Jeff's (aka ippsketch) banana packing sketch. While researching different methods I came across Amy Goodchild’s writeup on a wonderful sketch of hers called 'Maplands' where she used a similar strategy to what I ultimately did to implement my idea. I was left scratching my head at first and it took me quite a while to find a solution. In June I faced a packing problem where I had to draw all sorts of geometric shapes to the canvas. I also recently learned that a few others have made their own version of this idea.

You can see some of the artworks my code produced above. I never completed that particular idea, but it led to an interesting packing scheme. Before we begin, I want to point out that I had a first encounter with this algo back in February of 2022.

Packing 6 circles in rectangle