Ive been getting really inspired by procedural artwork for a while now, and I have been itching to have a try myself. After reading some great books like Form and Code & The Blind Watchmaker (see my earlier post) I decided to get stuck into some Processing. Processing was written by Ben Fry and Casey Reas at MIT with the goal of making code more accessable to artists.

As my company, (Bigman) uses tangrams extensively in its brand identity I thought it would be a fun first challenge to try and build a program that can generate patterns of tangram shapes automatically.
The solution seemed to be out of my reach until I managed to break down the problem into a few simple steps. The initial inspiration came from Sebastien Truchet

1. This is exactly like how Mr Truchet did it all those years ago. randomly oriently square tiles.

2. To break it up abit I added bigger ones every now and then

3. Things get a little more interesting when the small shapes are allowed to join into bigger shapes.

4. Adding a few more rules for how the small shapes can join together, and giving each a unique colour gives a nice broken pattern.

5. As this is coded rather than created by hand we can do cool things like huge canvas sizes.

6. By placing an image underneath our pattern and taking the colour from that pattern for each triangle, its possible to ‘filter’ an image into a tangram pattern similar to how a Photoshop filter might work

7. I have this working for animation sequences now, will be adding more features soon to make this into a fully fledged video effect.