Genuary 2, 10 minutes
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I have so many problems with this prompt. It seems adversarially written to challenge my own modes. I will not lie and say anything like “and that’s why I like it” because I don’t like it. I do find it useful to be challenged though. So, in that spirit I’m going to ignore all those pedantic and other voices and plunge ahead. Here goes a retracing of my thinking this morning, because I think it will be useful to future me and others who are not me now.
My first thought was to rebel against the completely unbounded brief here. And the second was that it has to be something simple. Cubes are simple. Maybe this is a chance to go after Mohr’s cubic limits.
After a few minutes of jotting on a 3x5 card, I realized that cubes were too ambitious for 10 minutes.
Let me explicitly spell out the vision for future me, and others.
Start with an isometric wireframe cube and only draw some of the lines. Arrange a grid of these with fewer and fewer of the lines drawn as the particular cube gets radially further from the center.
Sounds simple, right?
Well, I don’t have enough p5js fluency to do that one in 10 minutes. I’m not sure I’m fluent in anything enough to do that in 10 minutes. I discovered this by spending 20 minutes trying to draw just one cube the way I wanted in there. What even is the coordinate system orientation in 3d P5? Where is it documented? I give up. I descope.
What about squares in concentric circles? And only draw the square some of the time. And draw the circle arc segment when not drawing the square.
You can see the general idea in the second picture above. I spent a few minutes mentally checking that I thought I knew what all I wanted to do, knew the commands, etc. I set myself a stop watch and figured I’d just keep an eye on it. This is playing with the spirit of ‘made in 10 minutes’ which I interpret to mean about 10 minutes or a short amount of time, lets not get carried away here.
I don’t think I’ll bore you with all the things that I think are wrong with this iteration, but it’s where I got to at about 10 minutes. At least it’s complete. The signiture was extra, after the time ran out.
Quite disatisfied with it, I decided to go another few minutes and at least finish a bit more. I added some randomness and fixed a flaw that I saw, and styled more to my taste instead of the p5 defaults. Et voila.
This was unexpectedly better than I anticipated. I like that the concentric pattern is visible but also disrupted by the randomness. There are pockets of phantom concentric groups that go in and out of my vision. Surprisingly this is easier to see when the extra confusion of truncated squares at the edges are included.
I’ll come back to cubic limits and circles and squares another time. That’s all for today.
