curving a cubist substrate
was inspired by the beautiful Substrate
experiment and the Sand Painting technique
of artist and programmer Jared Tarbell.

Immediately after viewing Substrate,
I knew that I had to see what Jared's algorithms
would look like using curved lines,
rather than straight ones.

I randomly found an equation producing
exactly the behaviour I was envisioning,
on my first modification;

layers of concentric curves flow
across the landscape in a dance of
intelligence, chaos and precision.

To enhance the new movements in line that
I was witnessing, I altered Jared's rendering
techniques in several major ways:

lines are wider
and make more use
of translucency; fewer
are painted simultaneously
and the intensity and spacing
of the cracking quality itself
is dependant on both the
X and Y coordinates.

Displacing the uniformity of the cracking
allows line paths to overlap and for paths to cross
in areas of low cracking density, and for lines
to be bolder and the colors more intense
in areas of high cracking density.

This is very visible in the
rightmost render below in Figure 2,
and in the piece "worlds colliding".

several simultaneous palettes
are utilized with differing
probabilities, and a single
palette color is selected
for the life of one
crack seedling.

This technique allows a more natural,
yet deliberate, human-painted feeling
to come through the color selection.

This can be seen below in Figure 4,
and throughout the gallery.

growth is seeded
with a higher probability
in one of several image areas

A higher weight is given to a certain
region, in order to concentrate growth there.
For example, the canvas is split into four
sections along the (x_width / 2)
and (y_width / 2) axes.

Growth is then highest in one of the
four quadrants, as can easily be seen
below in Figure 5, as well as in the
pieces "metropolis" and
"expansion, part two".