Dec 29, 2014

Noise on Illustrator

Recently I read "Generative Art" by Matt Pearson.
I need more experiments to handle various techniques which described in the book, though.
One of the things I impressed is Perlin noise.
It is a sort of an orderly randomness, as I understand it for now.
As a first step, I applied this to Illustrator script.


This script changes the colors of the selected paths using the noise.
I used "perlin-noise-simplex.js" by Sean McCullough to generate the noise, with the help of the article "Generative Art In HTML5" in the website of the author of the book.
It worked on Illustrator with "@include".

Please see my page on Github for details.
https://github.com/shspage/illustrator-scripts#noisefilljsx


The image below is an example with a modified version of the script.


I inserted this code at line 174. (After the line "_paths[i].fillColor = col;")
_paths[i].translate(0, - col.gray / 2);
Now the noise values influence the position of the paths.

I'm reading "NATURE OF CODE" by Daniel Shiffman now.
In its introduction chapter, it warns against an overuse of Perlin noise.
Noise is useful. But it narrows our view if we rely on it too much.