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What it does

A framework for generative art made with Coffeescript, D3, Canvas and random numbers.

A boilerplate art script file with useful libraries and scaffolding is provided to create new works quickly. (src/artscripts/_boilerplate.coffee)

See lots of examples here.

Development

npm install before your first use.

Run npm dev in another tab to automatically compile any .coffee file when it is saved

To run any individual art script, you can (assuming you are in the project root) do node dist/artscripts/$FILENAME

To run the boilerplate example you would do node dist/artscripts/_boilerplate

To get started on a new artscript, you can clone the boilerplate cp src/artscripts/_boilerplate.coffee src/artscripts/MY-NEW-ARTSCRIPT.coffee and then modifying that with your editor atom src

Useful commands

watch -n0 node dist/artscripts/10-14 repeatedly runs the 10-14 artscript

ffmpeg -framerate 24 -pattern_type glob -i '*.png' -c:v libx264 -pix_fmt yuv420p $FILENAME.mp4 combines all exported .png files into a movie

Common options

There are a few common options used for artscripts.

• seed is the seed used for the random number generators. For the most part, an artscript run with the same seed will produce the same image every time. Your results may vary.
• count is the number of particles to place on the page.
• numTicks is the number of times to run the tick() function in the artscript. In -movie mode, each tick is exported as a frame.
• width and height are the width and height of the canvas in pixels.
• text is the text in the tweet that accompanies the image.

Development web view

The development web view is located at src/webserver.js

To quickly see changes when iterating on a script, this creates a simple web server that shows the latest .png created in the /dist/ folder. You can navigate to it at localhost:3000

Works well when paired with atom-browser

TODO

• Add watch script that compiles coffeescript on change

Examples