Watching nature sprout and bud all around, I wanted to learn how to generate forms which appear organic and plant-like to human eyes.
I looked for simple shapes to mimic, and found them in fir twigs.
To make this even simpler, I chose to depict just motionless contours. No shades or colors, no animation.
I did not feel like manually defining all details of an image myself, so I made an algorithm which completes an image, based on a coarse instruction. Given a path to follow, this algorithm places needles along this path, with pseudorandom variation similar to how needles appear on fir stems.
Besides the path, the algorithm is given a seed state to initialize the pseudorandom sequence. The combination of this seed and the path determines the produced contours. Changing the just seed results in a new arrangement of needles along the same path.
The frame below hosts a composition of contours generated this way.
Click the dice icon to assign a new random value as seed and change the resulting silhouette.
When working on the algorithm, I often wanted to zoom in to details of a sample output.
To make this easier, I added a magnifier.
This by-product is still present in the composition shown above and can be directed with the mouse cursor.