grape – BlobFamily

I read Blobjects: Beyond the New Fluidity in Design. The reading briefly mentioned how historically there was a move towards organic shapes in car design and that made me recall the amount of attention the cyber truck got. The reading also heavily implied that blobs are inherently friendly and welcoming, which prompted me to think about if it is even possible to make a blob seem harmful or dangerous.

I traced the contours of 2D metaballs (which is based off of this sketch by Dan Shiffman). I altered the code by removing velocity and changing how initial positions were instantiated, since my goal was just to produce svgs not animations.  I generated the position of the metaballs using a variation of the Thomas cluster point process in order to produce clusters that looked more blob-like (in my opinion). However it is conceptually different from this point process because I only use a Poisson Distribution on the parent points and not on the daughter points. The code I used to generate the distribution for the cluster centers can be found here. I trace six layers worth of isolines using this library which uses the marching squares algorithm at varying thresholds. I simultaneously generate bit masks for each of the six isometric layers, rasterize hatch patterns over top of these masks and trace the lines from the masked result. The hatch patterns consist of noise fields of varying stroke weight + circles but when the masked hatch is traced only the outline remains, which give the blobs a texture similar to muscle cells. Additionally I chose the little circle hatch because little circles contained in bigger circles seem very cell-like to me.