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Flow Field

Streamlines seeded on a Poisson disk, packed until they run out of room.

seed 26150

Output

PNG: 3508 × 4961 px at 300 dpi. PDF: vector, RGB, 297 × 420 mm page, no bleed. Printed area 297 × 420 mm.

0 mm

Millimetres of unprinted paper on every side. The piece is composed to fit what is left, not shrunk to fit it.

Field

0.0020

Smaller values give longer, lazier curves.

4
0.50
4

Pixels per field cell. Lower is finer and slower.

Line

800
10.0
8
8

Distance between the seed points lines grow from.

Angle-scaled reproduces the original sketch, where the field angle also sets the step size.

1.00

Colour

How it works

A Perlin noise field is sampled onto a grid and read as an angle at every cell. Seed points are scattered by Poisson disk sampling, which gives points that are random but never clumped, and a streamline is grown from each one: step, read the angle under you, turn, step again.

A line stops when it runs into ink that is already on the page. Every point a finished line laid down is kept in a spatial index, and each step of the next line asks that index whether the ground ahead is clear — so a curve runs until it comes up against one of its neighbours, and ends there rather than crossing it.

Because the lines are seeded in a shuffled order and each one respects everything already down, the packing is emergent rather than planned: some regions fill with long parallel runs, others jam up with short stubs where the field turns hard.

R regenerate · S PNG · P PDF