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Comment by OnACoffeeBreak | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone recommend tools for getting into generative art?

I have tried using a gamedev engine. It worked OK, but there have got to be better suited tools out there.

As mentioned in the article Processing is great! Super easy to start and there's some great sample libraries and code to to use for guidance.

http://processingjs.org/

After processing you can move onto openframeworks, which is written in c++ and more performant, but also comes with a bit of a learning curve if you dont have previous experience with c languages. https://openframeworks.cc

There's an old book with a bunch of pseudocode that might be interesting, especially if you're interested in the early examples provided in the article.

Computers, Pattern, Chaos, and Beauty by Clifford Pickover.

https://www.amazon.com/Computers-pattern-chaos-beauty-Graphi...

Clifford Pickover has some great books, I can't recommend them enough if you're interested in the intersection between maths and art.

Processing is probably the most popular and accessible.

OpenFrameworks and Cinder are probably a bit more powerful, but more difficult to use (built around c++).

I also like PaperJS, which is built around JavaScript, but doesn't have the performance of Processing and OpenFrameworks.

Finally, you can just use raw drawing APIs (such as Canvas in the browser).

Good list of resources here: https://github.com/kosmos/awesome-generative-art

Here's something I've been working on ~ https://generativeartistry.com/ ~ aimed at getting people started with generative art using the <canvas> ... its less about the tools, and more about learning general techniques that will get you creating.

Another option for interesting generative art would be generative music.

There's tons of opensource audio/music generation software (ChucK, supercollider/overtone, csound, vcvrack), and there's a fun (expensive) world of modular synthesizers lurking around the corner (euclidean rhythm generation is a common technique, many people use logic gates with random of sequenced high/low signals to create interesting patterns, random voltage generation is used for pitches, etc).

If you go super far down the rabbit hole, I've seen examples of people doing generative visual art with a modular synthesizer, modulating video loop parameters, or running oscilloscopes. Anything is possible!

Processing is the most popular among artists, and so it has the most artistic tools ready to just drop in and use. If you want to focus on the art-making, it's your best choice until you feel you've outgrown it. You can just jump straight into brushing and blitting and blending and whatever without having to scour GitHub or craft something yourself from bare metal.

The only caveat is that if you're coming from a programming background (and it sounds like you are), it feels a little rudimentary and wonky. You might sometimes feel your style of approaching a problem straining against Processing's control flow and language constraints.

If you like the concepts of Processing but want more out of the language, you might be interested in Quil[0], which is a Clojure (or ClojureScript) wrapper API.

It allows live-coding sketches from Emacs to work really nicely.

[0] https://github.com/quil/quil

If you're interested in the fractal side of generative art, you can try our software Chaotica: https://www.chaoticafractals.com/

I’m currently enjoying ShaderToy. I’ll second nominations for processing and NodeBox. I think plain old C++ and Python and JavaScript are also good places to start for still images. JavaScript comes with the most built-in support for creating and displaying images. D3 is an excellent library for taking JavaScript further.

If you were using a game engine to make generative 3d animations, maybe Houdini (sidefx.com) is something you’re interested in. (Other options: Maya, Blender)

The article had a couple of pointers for GAN based generative tools.

The first, more important question, is what kind of generative art do you want to make?

NodeBox spawned PlotDevice, which is a very nice Python toy for the Mac.

https://plotdevice.io/

I much prefer it to Processing.

If you like the idea of recursive 3D generative art, I recommend checking out structure synth.

http://structuresynth.sourceforge.net/

https://p5js.org/ for a javascript version of Processing

Also check nodebox [0].

[0] https://www.nodebox.net

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