Procedural Copper Gate

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Procedural Copper Gate

The image above is a piece of procedural art generated from a directed evolution session that started with the MSG preset configuration we built in yesterday’s post. We’ll take a look at the process I followed to create this image, and reflect on the nature of hand built design vs directed random mutation and evolution in creating artwork.

The gallery below shows off the IO (input-output) connections and the various processors used to build the above procedural abstract image. If you look at it closely, you will see that it’s very similar to the second MSG preset hand built yesterday that was based on modulating a series of stacked 3C Abstract5 GridMod CP processors with GenAdvTurb processors that feed into Tmp Img stream.

The overall procedure I used to arrive at the final abstract image above (and it’s associated MSG preset since it is a procedural image generated from a series of math processors) is an interesting one. As you will recall from yesterday’s post, we started with a fairly simple strategy to work with the 3C Abstract5 GridMod CP processor. First, modulating it with the green source image stream. Then, expanding the preset by stacking 2 additional 3C Abstract5 GridMod CP processors to overlay 3 different modulated abstract grid images on top of each other.

We then expand the modulation concept, to use specific individual generator processors (GenAdvTurb) that feed into a temporary image stream, and to use those turbulence noise images to modulate the 3C Abstract5 GridMod CP processors. Then, we mentioned in passing at the end of yesterday’s post that you could then use this fixed processor configuration as a starting point in the Evolution Editor and work with Mutate or Swap evolution to create an amazing variety of different and unique abstract procedural images.

To get to my final image above, I spent some time working with Swap evolution to move through different mutated random processors that fit into the fixed IO configuration I built by hand yesterday. And while the final hand built configuration from yesterday might have seemed a little complex at first glance, in reality it’s just a series of copy and paste operations of a simple generate a noise image and then use it to modulate an abstract grid generator template. So we thought up a simple strategy to build imagery, and then duplicated it several times to overlay additional modulated imagery to build additional complexity in the generate output artwork.

I also used the Add Evoluton command button 2 times in my directed evolution session to get to the final preset configuration used above. Once I just pressed the Add button, which adds a randomly picked processor to a random position in the MSG preset processor list. I also use a second Shift Add, which adds a random meta-effect to the end of the processor chain (as opposed to adding a single random processor). We have discussed Swap and Add evolution here on this blog many times in the past.

After working with the 2 different kinds of Add evolution, I again continued my Swap and Mutate cycles until I arrived at the final procedural image above. At first glance, the image gallery above that shows off the complete MSG preset processor by processor seems very complex. And in fact, if I started with hand editing from scratch the likelihood that I would create this particular preset is essentially very unlikely. Also, if I had some idea in my head to create an image of a copper gate I don’t think i’d have the slightest idea of how to build the MSG preset from scratch.

But yet I was able to arrive at this particular image. And the process did involve some initial hand building of a particular preset configuration. One that does incorporate the concept of objects organized on a grid. One that was actually pretty easy to hand build, because it involved taking a very simple idea and then duplicating or stacking the processors to generate more complexity. And then working with directed evolution to introduce controlled but yet random variation and additional complexity into the evolving preset and resulting final image.

So I think it’s worth taking the time to look over today and yesterday’s posts, and try to grasp the overall concept of how I started with a very simple idea for a MSG preset, expanded on it, then used it as the basis for directed evolution to build something very sophisticated that I probably never could have conceived of or hand built if I had just started from scratch and tried to program this particular effect with some vague preconceived notion of generating an abstract copper gate.

The image gallery below shows off different mutated variants of the preset used to generate the image at the top of the post. The first one was generated by option clicking the MSG Advanced Editor preview cell,so it only shows mutate color variants of the original preset.

The 2nd image shows clicking the MSG Advanced Editor preview cell, so it’s mutated variants of the original preset. The 3rd image shows Swap evolution based off of the original preset. The 4th and 5th images show Option Swap and Shift Swap evolution respectively. Option Swap swaps more than one processor. Shift Swap swaps all of the processors. You can see that each respectively introduces more variability into the mutated variants.

For more information on evolving and editing MSG presets, check out this tip.

Category: MSG

Tags: evolution procedural art

Procedural Copper Gate

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