Category: 03-Meander

I loved reading about Hodgin’s process of creating this work. Similar to my Looking Outwards on Manolo Gamboa Naon, I love it when artists attempt to recreate nature and mother earth with computation and technology. Breaking down how mother nature works by formulas, points, and vectors and the contrast of philosophy and process really fires me up in a good way. I learned a lot of things from his process because I feel like I lost a lot of my coding skills after taking a year break from coding, but watching his beautiful work come to life motivates me – such as his process of thinking through how to create oxbow lakes by isolating two collision points and turning it into its own curve segment or using Voronoi fracture to turn the background plane into smaller polygons. His background map was similar to what I wanted to create in my grid-plan city map but I couldn’t think through how I could code that out.

I learned several things from reading Robert Hodgin’s documentation of Meander. Firstly, the documentation of the mechanism for the river’s movement and the road generation was really insightful; I had never considered that to create novel motion, each point can be assigned a direction vector (I think learning to think in terms of vectors and vector fields may prove fruitful for my future work). Also, Hodgin’s solution for generating unique placenames by referencing actual geographical data is brilliant.

I learned that the river “deletes” part of itself in favor of a shorter path and creates oxbow lake, and Hodgin took in consideration of such phenomenon in his project.

Another part I really liked/learned is that the mixture of curving(representing paths that naturally developed over time) and non-curving(representing artificially made roads) vectors result in a resemblance of intersecting roads.

I. LOVE. THIS. WORK.

It’s so beautiful and elegant. Something I learned from it other than I wanna become someone like this is that math is so important. I am really contemplating taking more calculation-based math classes. Another key take way is his level of attentiveness to detail. Everything put on there has been thought out completely and he is still in the process of changing its logic to make it better.

 

Reading this was really insightful in the way that it put into formal, real words a lot of the ideas I was having when creating my map assignment. That generation of randomness of streets and rivers is something that I tried to simply emulate using randomness and it took me some time to realize that it isn’t enough to just create random lines starting from a center but actually have multiple points (or in the case of rivers, a line) to start paving and building the terrain.