teaching machines

Bad Star

April 19, 2018 by Chris Johnson. Filed under madeup, public.

If you are an illustrator, there are two things that are harder to draw than anything else. The first is lettering. Bless you, illustrators, if you have to draw a busy street scene with lots of storefronts full of signs and words. The second is stars. Most illustrators just give up on stars. They are too hard.

I wondered if I could “draw” bad stars in Madeup. My first attempt visits the 10 vertices of a star, five for the points and five for the armpits. In a regular star, these vertices occur exactly 36 degrees apart on a circle’s perimeter. To form an irregular star, I visit these angles but perturb them ever so slightly. I also perturb the radius. Here’s the result:

  

    angleMargin = 5
radiusMargin = 1
outerRadius = 8
innerRadius = 4

for i to 10
  -- Even steps are the points, odd steps are the
  -- concavities.
  if i % 2 == 0
    radius = outerRadius
  else
    radius = innerRadius
  end
  
  -- Perturb by random margins.
  radius = radius + random -radiusMargin, radiusMargin
  angle = i * 36 + random -angleMargin, angleMargin
  
  polarto radius, angle
end
home

extrude 0, 0, 1, 2

    
    
    
  
  
  

Click the middle button (Solidify) to generate a new star.

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