2011/10/29

Cellular automata, HTML5, canvas tools

I recently built a new homepage to celebrate Fall and kill a few weekends playing with canvas, javascript and CA.

A little while back I had an idea to use Cellular Automata rules to generate random groupings of xy coordinates. This worked well as a way to generate a rock pattern for my canvas drawing. I even developed a tool to help me refine the parameters to use that produced the pattern I wanted.

I wanted to expand on that approach to make something more abstract and vizzy. And animation seemed like the next step. So I built a ca animation tool that allowed me to play around with animating generated CA sets of cells from one state to the next.

It lets you embed js into the callbacks for the driving parameters and even saves your settings into the hash tag so you can bookmark settings that you like and link to them.

So I'm publishing them both here for you to play with. :)