I wanted to create tiles that do not tile in the conventional sense, but rather that create emergent structures from overlapping. I created a few basic primitives (top) and used triangular coordinates to implement the overlapping (bottom).
I struggled quite a bit with finding a good tiling algorithm because there is an optimization between dense overlapping clusters (top left) and leaving space between tiles (top right). In the end, I just randomly placed a set of 20 tiles for each iteration of a loop (bottom left). I also experimented with vector fields and subsampling.
The final plots came out well. The left two plots were from a different algorithm than randomly placing tiles. That algorithm involved using probability distributions to determine where a new tile should occur. I think I will further experiment with two tone colors like in the purple plot, however, I’m a bigger fan of the monocolor plots.