I made the background you see above with code.
More or less.
Let's begin with a short story - I like to create art. But I'm not good at it. But I still want to create it, and I want it to look good.
That's a story that repeats itself in my head almost on a daily basis, alongside thoughts about art projects I could work on and why I may not be able to start working on them because they require skills I don't have.
One type of art I really like is abstract art. I don't exactly know why, but for me, it has a strange beauty. However, creating abstract art can be quite hard sometimes, and to get a single good piece, you often have to go through dozens of trials.
So I recently thought about the process, and about 3D modelling, and after searching a bit on YouTube I discovered that you can create 3D art using code in Blender, something I did not think was possible. I knew you could code in Blender, but I thought that's only to create addons and plugins.
After watching a few videos, I kept on digging and discovered something called "generative systems", a fancy name for something rather easy to understand.
For those unfamiliar with programming, it might be interesting to know that you can actually create visual elements with code. It's something I knew for a while, but never thought about too much in the past, until a few days ago.
After some additional research I found a really interesting video on YouTube made by someone called "matthew epler" (that's either his name or the name of his channel, I don't know), who used p5.js , which is a JavaScript library used for creative coding, to create the awesome crystal-like shapes you see in the image above.
He has a 21 part tutorial in which he explains exactly how to code the entire system, or, if you are only interested in the code, his videos have a link to his GitHub where you can simply get the code without following the entire process.
I decided to go through all of his tutorials and follow him while coding, in order to get a better understanding of the code itself, and it was a good idea - I learned quite a few things.
I'm really happy I managed to find his tutorials and that now I have a system that allows me to create those cool crystal-like shapes over and over again with literally no more work involved.
Obviously I'll tweak the code and play with it and see what else I create. I'll start with changing the colors of the shapes, and maybe even try to add some new ones. After all, it's a system I can develop further and modify in order to help me create even more art with very little effort, which I like.
If you want to try this yourself or you're simply curious to see how he did it, you can find his channel here: https://www.youtube.com/user/matthewepler/videos
Now that I'm done with this, I'm gonna have to find another project to work on. Maybe I'll give coding in Blender a try.