Large Assignment 1: L-System Lace – Yie-Sheng Chen

1. Three L-systems.

1.1 abstract fractal

For me, the difficult part is to get a general sense of L-system. I reviewed the slide, and the Alg. Beauty of Plant book and ran the rules and interpretations again. And then I try to change the angles, rules. Sometimes, the shape stays a wiggly line as I varied the rules, angles. In the end I can up with the following abstract fractal which uses rules similar to the dragon curve but L and R rules takes more turns, and the angle is set to 45 degree:

Also in my initial review and exploration, I cannot reproduce the “combination of islands and lakes” curve. I later found out it’s due to missing identity rules. Also this “combination of islands and lakes” curve reminds me of the lake town in the Lord of the Rings.

1.2. botanical form.

I has been fascinated with kelp forest: the mysterious cold water off the coast of California or Hokkaido where various creatures roams maybe like an undersea city. Also kelp (Kombu) tastes good with Chili oil and some people said kombu also got terroir like wine.

The following is a basic kelp. The challenge in creating it is how to make the shape of its blade. At first, I tried to use processing’s curveVertex (catmull-rom spline), but I cannot figure out how to arrange points of the spline to make the shape of a kelp blade. Then, I though about using lines to make squares and this takes more time than expected to get right. However, in the end, I found out I can just use processing’s square and also easily apply a kelp palette of colors. In this kelp L-System, I randomly varied the length of the kelp blade and also randomly decide whether to grow a kelp blade at the tip.

I also use another branching L-system with 90 degree to layout many kelps to make kelp forest:

I also used laser cutter to make wood cut:

1.3. L-system interpreted with other than simple lines

I used the starting position and current position of the turtle as axis for an ellipse and also turns this axis randomly and use one end point to start a swirling floral path:

The image below shows the axis and the original L system curve interpretation:

2. Rogan brown inspired cut out.

I got the idea of city when browsing classmates’ posts and wants to try it myself. My concept is as mentioned previously in kelp forest: a 90 degree branching L system as a grid layout of a city. The grid can correspond to the subway systems of a city. And then I randomly add circles to the tips of the branch L system. In each circle, my idea is to put in different elements of city life. In the end, I only tried to arrange floral shapes inside the circle instead of some other variations such as Keith Haring styled drawings. However, after Adobe illustrator and laser cutter, the results looks more interesting. The combined flowers looked like hearts, feet, hairdo or maybe infants inside mother’s womb.

Besides the idea of a city, my design is also based on the following Rogan Brown piece, where various elements is arranges in layers inside a circular space: https://roganbrown.com/artwork/4800525-Ghost-Coral-Colour-Variation.html

And the following is my original Rogan Brown inspired L-system image:

my code: https://handandmachine.org/classes/computational_fabrication/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/YieshengChenLA1.zip