Fractal Friday 2020.01.17

This week’s images again come from some experiments with new features for MathPaint, the flagship software app I’m working on. Previously I posted some experiments with edge rendering in fractal geometry, where only the boundary between levels of output are drawn. It shows the boundary between iteration levels but does not indicate the level itself … Read moreFractal Friday 2020.01.17

Hello World, from MathPaint! (Preview)

If you’ve been following Mathaesthetics posts you’ve seen a variety of images shared – different types of generated art from fractals to repeated 2D plots to vector fields and scalar fields and more. All images on this blog are created by our flagship software product, which has been in development since November 2019. Today for … Read moreHello World, from MathPaint! (Preview)

Fractal Friday 2020.01.10

ICYMI, I’m currently writing an application that generates mathematical art. It’s created in Swift, for Mac OS desktop systems. All the images on this blog are created from it, including the fractals posted every Fractal Friday. This week I hooked up a full range of CoreImage effects to the app, and I’m having fun sending … Read moreFractal Friday 2020.01.10

Fractal Friday 2020.01.03

The noise renderer has gotten more sophisticated in the past week, and it’s being put to work in this week’s set of fractals. Each image includes a generated noise-texture, with various approaches to transparency in the fractal permitting the texture to show through. The Julia set image above has a semi-transparent purple in the color … Read moreFractal Friday 2020.01.03

Fractal Friday 2019.12.27

It’s the last Fractal Friday of the year, time for some recursive magic!  This week we’re exploring the Mandelbrot set, using two features of the Mathaesthetics prototype software: deep color mapping, and a new helpful zoom feature. Here’s where we start: In this image, there’s a color mapping with 10 different colors at various levels … Read moreFractal Friday 2019.12.27

Dev notebook: an enum alternative to GKState / GKStateMachine

I worked on my first GameplayKit project earlier this year and there were things I liked about the lightweight, general state-machine model provided by the GKState and GKStateMachine classes. However I also found a few odd patterns in these classes: their implementation without using enumeration values for states, the inelegant (StateClass).class.self syntax model required by … Read moreDev notebook: an enum alternative to GKState / GKStateMachine

Fractal Friday 2019.12.20

The fractal renderer used to draw this week’s graphics has a new feature – rendering in ‘edge’ mode. Rather than filling the value regions with different colors, edge-mode detects the change in output values and draws a line at the boundary between them. Here’s the classic Mandelbrot set rendered this way: Here’s a simple black-and-white … Read moreFractal Friday 2019.12.20

Scalar fields for gradients and other graphic patterns

The Mathaesthetics flagship app will support a number of modes of mathematical image creation. I spent most of yesterday working on and improving the scalar field renderer. In a scalar field, a function f(x, y) produces a value for each point. This scalar value is then mapped to a color gradient. I’m exploring both different … Read moreScalar fields for gradients and other graphic patterns

Fractal Friday 2019.12.13

It’s Friday already! This week I’ve been jamming on this application UI development, including a brand-new feature to support fractals: the color mapping control: For fractal rendering the integers below each color correspond to the output value (escape iterations) to which the color is assigned. The linear-gradient mapping mode means that colors between these values … Read moreFractal Friday 2019.12.13

Dev notebook: Converting scale & position of circular NSSlider for degrees

The standard Cocoa control NSSlider comes in a circular variety that resembles a rotating knob with an indicator point. Among the ideal applications for such a control is representing a circular angle. In the application I’m developing I wanted to use this to control the angle of the brush image used for drawing. I began … Read moreDev notebook: Converting scale & position of circular NSSlider for degrees