The concept of Fabrication

Fabrication is about the delight of complexity emerging from a system of simple grids of simple shapes and shaping functions.

Structures resembling cityscapes, pages from an opening book, woven fabrics wafting in the wind, urban layouts seen from above, staircases, all emerge from a grid system of triangles, squares, or sometimes circles.

Development

The spark of this project came many months ago when trying to marry a pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) with a flow field.

I wrote a simple shader that textures shapes with the output of a (purposely) broken PRNG. I call it broken because a working PRNG should produce what looks like static, as its output is 'random'. This one almost does that, but surprising and elaborate patterns are woven in.

These textured elements made each primitive shape (except for solid-coloured ones) unique. Placing these shapes in a grid, rotating them according to a flow field, and playing around with their sizes made for an almost endless exploration of form and composition.

With that foundation in place I set out to also explore the colour space.

Tinkering with the algorithm I learnt a great deal about shape-shape interactions in grids and the endless parameters that can be changed to create virtually infinite variety- which I tried to control just a little to produce a cohesive set of outputs.