Escher Sketch | Hacker News Reader

Escher Sketch

levskaya.github.io

207 pointsjaytaylor22 comments

Author here - If I thought people were going to rediscover this old project I might have invested some time in redoing the UI, apologies for the crudeness. I was inspired to make a quick plane-symmetry sketching tool after being inspired for years by islamic pattern art, but much more could be done in this direction, especially with a proper vector tool. I highly recommend "The Symmetries of Things" http://goo.gl/1zzZjz for a mathematically deep, readable and well-illustrated coverage of symmetry. "Islamic Design" http://goo.gl/UCkRSa for a beautiful intro to the amazing designs one can achieve exploiting symmetries.

I'm actually more impressed with polyHédronisme [1] linked from that page. Great.

[1] http://levskaya.github.io/polyhedronisme/

Yeah, topological operators are just amazingly cool and are deeply related to subdivision surfaces and many other beautiful parts of geometry. I'd recommend checking out the mathematical sculptor George Hart (whose work introduced these operators to me) http://goo.gl/zrKAEK, as well as Wenzel Jamnitzer's beautiful "Perspectiva Corporum Regularium" http://goo.gl/2WKcyN

Here are the links without going through Google's URL shortener:

http://www.georgehart.com/sculpture/sculpture.html

http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/2009/08/jamnitzer-perspecti...

Cool ... when I first started playing with it, I found I could make Spiro-Graph like art. Then I had to see how it worked and with just a few more circles of the mouse, I had a solid black pane.

Some engineers will never be artists ;)

don't count yourself out yet! art is expression, and i'd bet you are good at some form of self-expression, even if you don't really think of it that way.

Emphatically agree. Programmers are code artists practicing self-expression in the same vein as the architect of a building. And when they get too clever for their own good, it just as quickly devolves into creating a space that's hostile to its inhabitants.

Awesome! I tried making something like this a few months ago[1] but never got around to finishing it (tiling is busted and performance is pretty terrible): http://lou.wtf/patturn/

Wallpaper groups are really neat. I especially love the p3 and p6 groups.

i think i actually prefer yours, seems more fun

Is it supposed to be a Malevich? (FF45, Linux)

Probably not. I don't know art history; wontfix. ;)

I really want to draw in red and blue, then find some of those cheap 3D glasses and see what the result looks like. Very neat program.

author is a synthetic biologist who had two first author Nature publications. Super awesome dude.

Inkscape's tile-clones allows you to do this. It's great fun and gives you the full power of vector graphics.

It's incredible what beautiful designs can be created with such simple tessellations.

Really cool. The source code from the creator, Anselm Levskaya, is on github: https://github.com/levskaya/eschersketch

Cool but...what's it doing?

Its creating tessellations in the style of M.C. Escher. I was searching for something like this after seeing this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kcc56fRtrKU

Unfortunately it doesn't seem to perform well in Firefox. Both on my Windows desktop and Linux laptop I get about 2 FPS, whereas it's perfectly smooth in Chrome on both. Really fun, though!

This is cool. Reminds me of this Islamic art game too: http://www.engare.design/

:+1: http://imgur.com/53VQUS0

This is awesome! I can't stop drawing, please help!

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