So far, I’ve made some pretty good progress with my Generative Lego Art project; it’s mostly all there, but I do want to see if I can add a few more features and tweak the randomness a little bit.
One feature that I’d like to have is the ability to save screenshots of the different environments that users create. It would be nice to let users take home their work, and I’d also like to be able to show a gallery from different users on my portfolio, for example.
I ran into a few problems while getting to this point. The most troublesome problem I ran into was adjusting the randomness. While the terrain was generating properly, the trees and flowers (and shrub) wasn’t generating as I expected. I was hoping for something that looked totally random, but I was getting something that resembled a repeating pattern. It still looked pretty good to me, however; and it still included some sort of randomness (you wouldn’t be able to predict the pattern exactly, for example). I won’t go into details here, but if you want more technical information and a deeper understanding of how this project works, you can check out the github; as of writing this, I don’t have anything of substance written out yet over there, but I will have stuff there soon.
Example of a seemingly repeating pattern that is actually still random
In the final days of this project, I want to try to improve the randomness and add the screenshot feature, but if I can’t do those tasks, then I’d still be pretty happy with what I made as of now. I believe it fits my chosen aesthetic, which emphasizes Vagueness, Abstraction, Irregularity. Its vagueness comes from what the project creates: it produces blocks of terrain that come from randomness, and there’s no context to this terrain existing. It’s abstract in the way that it doesn’t represent our reality. and it relies on the generated Legos to achieve its form and effect. Irregularity may not exist fully, but the randomness that I’ve implemented, in my opinion, qualifies enough for irregularity.
Here’s a video of how it works as of now.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1o32Re67hHkXznEPavQlEC0ZAKpy07I9I/view?usp=share_link
3 Comments. Leave new
Hi Josh,
This is one of the most creative projects I’ve seen so far. You’ve done a really good job emphasizing your aesthetic in your design.
I like what you’ve made so far and it looks like you are almost finished, congrats! One thought about randomness: Because it’s a different reality, the concept of “irregular” would look different. The regularity of the bumps on the legos makes it feel like this is a highly regulated world, so the fewer irregularities are actually standing out more. So I think the amount of randomness it has looks really good, fwiw.
What an interesting project to do for this class. I feel like most everyone went with a physical design and I think it was very innovative to stray from that mind set. Good job, and I think the generator looks good, even with the consistent patterns.