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Voronoi Relaxation

Every point on the sheet claimed by its nearest site, then the sites moved to the middle of what they claimed, over and over.

Output

A set shares every setting — paper, border, the sketch’s own knobs — and differs only in the seed. Regenerate any one of them without touching the others.

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.

Sites

260

Uniform random clumps; watch the relaxation undo that.

Relaxation

0

Each step moves every site to the centroid of its own cell. Zero is the raw diagram.

1.00

How far toward the centroid each step actually goes.

Drawing

0

Shrink every cell toward its own centroid, as a percentage. Turns a tessellation into tiles with grout.

Join the sites whose cells share an edge.

0.0
1.25

Colour

How it works

A Voronoi cell is every point on the sheet closer to one site than to any other. That definition is also a construction: the set of points closer to A than to B is one side of the perpendicular bisector between them, so a cell is the whole sheet clipped by one half-plane per other site. Clip against all of them and what is left is the cell, exact and convex — which is what a vector export wants. It is quadratic rather than the O(n log n) a Fortune sweep would give, and the one optimisation that matters is the skip: a site further away than twice the cell’s current radius cannot reach it.

Lloyd’s algorithm is then two lines. Move every site to the area-weighted centroid of its own cell, and rebuild the diagram. Repeat, and the cells converge on a centroidal Voronoi tessellation — the blue-noise honeycomb behind stippling, mosaic work and dot screens, where every cell is roughly the same size and roughly hexagonal. Watching it happen is the point of the piece: at zero steps the sites are wherever they were scattered and the sizes are wildly uneven; by six or eight the clumping the scatter left behind has gone.

The dual comes free. Every site that actually cut the cell during the clipping is a neighbour, and joining those pairs is the Delaunay triangulation — the same information read the other way round. Setting a Lloyd step to less than full strength moves each site part of the way to its centroid instead, which is a slower and gentler road to the same place.

R regenerate · S PNG · P PDF