Last week, I stumbled upon a great stackexchange discussion on procedural art . The idea was to come up with three code snippets that would be used to generate an image. More specifically, each snippet – one for each color channel (R, G, B) – is a function that, given a pixel coordinate, returns its intensity. Each snippet should fit in a single tweet.
This very interesting exercise inspired me into creating @artreepie . artreepie is a Twitter bot that captures mentions to him containing code snippets and generates art pieces. The three pieces of code sent to artreepie from a user are used to build the image, which is sent back to the user by the bot.
Implementation
artreepie uses a modified version of twik , a tiny lisp-like language, in its rendering engine. The code snippet to be tweeted to artreepie may use a number of provided variables and functions:
Variables
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| i | Column number of pixel being calculated (starting from zero) |
| j | Row of pixel being calculated (starting from zero) |
| w | Image width in pixels (currently 1024) |
| h | Image height in pixels (currently 1024) |
Functions
| Name | Syntax | Example |
|---|---|---|
| If | if | (if true 1 0) |
| And | and | (and true false) |
| Or | or | (or true false) |
| Sine | sin | (sin 1.0) |
| Cosine | cos | (cos 1.0) |
| Bitwise And | & | (& 1 2 3) |
| Bitwise Or | | | (| 1 2 3 ) |
| Modulo | % | (% 10 2) |
| Random [0.0, 1.0) | rnd | (rnd) |
| Square Root | sqrt | (sqrt 16) |
| Square | sq | (sq 10) |
| Less Than | < | (lt 1 4) |
| Greater than | > | (gt 1 4) |
| Equals | == | (== 1 1) |
| Not equal | != | (!= 1 2) |
Ok, I am ready to use it
In order to use artreepie all you need is a Twitter account. Tweets are processed in the order they were posted: the first tweet will be used for the red channel, the second for the green channel and the third for the blue channel.
This image was generated with the following tweets:
@artreepie (& i j)
@artreepie (% (+ i j) 255)
@artreepie (& i j)In case of errors during the computation of the image – e.g. division by zero – the whole image is silently discarded. For testing different expressions before submitting it to artreepie, you may use a command line version of the bot available in the project page on Github .
Some generated images
Here are some example images, listed in the stackexchange thread, written using twik:
@artreepie (if (and (!= i 0) (!= j 0)) (& (% i j) (% j i)) 0)
@artreepie (if (and (!= i 0) (!= j 0)) (+ (% i j) (% j i)) 0)
@artreepie (if (and (!= i 0) (!= j 0)) (| (% i j) (% j i)) 0)@artreepie (var s (/ 3.0 (+ j 99))) (* (+ (% (+ (* j s) (* s (+ i w))) 2) (% (+ (* j s) (* s (- (* w 2) i))) 2)) 127)
@artreepie (var s (/ 3.0 (+ j 99))) (* (+ (% (+ (* j s) (* s (+ i w))) 2) (% (+ (* j s) (* s (- (* w 2) i))) 2)) 127)
@artreepie (var s (/ 3.0 (+ j 99))) (* (+ (% (+ (* j s) (* s (+ i w))) 2) (% (+ (* j s) (* s (- (* w 2) i))) 2)) 127)Your turn!
What can you come up with? Tweet and get into @artreepie’s gallery .
TL;DR
- Tweet three code snippets in twik mentioning @artreepie ;
- Check the image gallery on Twitter;
- Fork the repository and have fun!