Social Networks.

Molecular Clouds.

Neuronal Circuitries.

Quantum Mechanical Structures.

Blurring Boundaries.

Infinite Self-Similarities.

Total.

Mess.

Perfect.

Order.

Color Palettes

Each palette (with three exceptions) comes with a reduced version (only the core colors are used) to achieve different effects. With the full palette you sometimes get very washed out, with the reduced version somewhat more defined outputs.

Painting Ground

To clearly see the differences, it's best to look at the tokens in live view and/or download a png by pressing "s". All textures are generative.

Preliminary Drawing

The Preliminary Drawing is the actual subdivided grid on which all elements in the artwork are based. This feature tells if and how much this grid is visible. It consists of many individual bezier curves that are randomly scattered using multiple map functions inside a for-loop.

"cope without it" (no grid)

"need a little help" (very light drawn grid)

"accidentally grabbed the sharpie" (the grid is fully shown)

Connections

The number of polygons that make up the cores. The cores are the main actors of Breeding Grounds and everything revolves around them. They are made up of polygons formed by a simple for-loop that goes into another for-loop to give them their rounded appearance. The higher the number, the fuller the cores appear. I added circles to the corners of the polygons to illustrate the idea of nodes connected in a network.

"1"

"42"

"166"

Inner Connections

If the cores consist of less than 20 polygons (see above), we can catch a glimpse of the inner architecture of the cores.

"visible"

"invisible"

Trails

Determines the thickness of the particle trails emanating from the cores. The first time I experimented with the stroke weight and changed it to 4 px (deep connection), I was blown away by the complexity of the outputs and the change in the overall appearance.

"confused particles" (no trails)

"light"

"medium"

"heavy"

"deep connection" (very thick trails)

PoV

Our position as an observer.

"distant"

"fly-by"

"trapped in the network"

Symmetry

Indicates whether the cores are aligned to the grid or rotated randomly.

"aligned"

"chaos"

Color Distribution

The respective color palette can be distributed either per core or per polygon. This leads to interesting and sometimes very blurry results.

"macro"

"micro"

First of all, thank you for making it this far. Breeding Grounds has become like a good friend to me, and seeing it come to fruition has made me really proud and sentimental at the same time. And I still am.

Aside from the whole brain-universe comparison, one of the more technical approaches of Breeding Grounds was to take beautiful and innocent color palettes and mess them up by mixing and layering colors a thousand times. Similar to how gas and matter in molecular clouds are clumped together and formed into something larger.

This often creates a depth effect reminiscent of volumetrics. However, in the HQ outputs, it becomes clear that these "volumetrics" are made up of thousands of razor-thin lines that only blend together at the right viewing distance/zoom level.

An important aspect of Breeding Grounds is that it’s also intended to exist in the physical world. I therefore offer to anyone who wants to make a print of their iteration to export an HQ version of it. I didn't want to just make this available as a direct export from the code, because it's always nicer to talk to each other in person and possibly customize the output. Just send me a DM via Twitter (@pxlshrd) or Discord (pxlshrd #8590).

To express more precisely what I feel for and about Breeding Grounds, Sermin (who is responsible for the names of the palettes) and I have created an accompanying playlist.