glambient

nixfiles:glambient

Glambient is a computer program for exploring periodic tilings. The program can run as a tiling design program or as eyecandy under windows, or it can produce shockwave flash files that can be viewed over the web.

If you are on a unix box, this page will run very poorly because of all the embedded flash animations. I'll split this out into separate pages soon, but in the meantime visit the directory of animations.

source code

You can download the source code. It is very poorly packaged and documented, and better for reading than for compiling. There are two other documents on what it does and how it works that might be helpful in figuring it out. If you are seriously trying to compile it, get in touch.
Send comments to nix, at nixfiles dotcom.

flash animations

Here are a few examples of what glambient looks like when exploring some tilings. These are recordings of glambient bouncing around inside a constrained space, rather than scripted animations. I'm thinking about scripts, and particularly choreography, quite a bit.
If you see still images or blankness rather than flash movies, you may need to install or reinstall the flash player.

FULLSCREEN WARNING: if you have IE, the (fullscreen) button will open up a new fullscreen browser window, with no obvious way to close it. On windows with IE you can use the key combinations ctrl-w or alt-f4 to close the window. At some point i'll put a way of escaping from fullscreen into the animation itself, but for now you're on your own.

 get flash

(fullscreen)  (swf file)

sam and max's stairwell

This is from a brick pattern on the stairs where some friends live. There are constraints keeping various edges parallel or perpendicular to each other (the nature of the constraint system requires that they also be the same length in this case). There are also "forces" that kick in to prevent facets from self-intersecting. The program is wandering through the constrained space, changing direction when it encounters resistance from an approaching degeneracy.

a less constrained version

Someone felt that the first version of this pattern was "almost too symmetrical", so here it is with a few constraints removed... the first version has four degrees of freedom, this one has eight. There's definitely a nice point to be found somewhere in between, but right now i don't have quite enough flexibility in the constraints to specify what i want.

(fullscreen)  (swf file)

(fullscreen)  (swf file)

six degrees of freedom

a candidate for the happy medium, with six degrees of freedom. currently i have to set up the constraints for each of these things by hand, but in the future it should be possible to wander between constrained spaces as well as within just one.

hexagons at play

A basic hexagonal tiling with some constraints applied. It was stuck in an interesting corner of the space (the long vertical herringbone pattern) when i started recording.

(fullscreen)  (swf file)

(fullscreen)  (swf file)

field of nekker cubes

add a couple more edges and constraints to the hexagonal tiling above and you may be tempted to interpret the results as three dimensional...

Xs and diamonds

the parallelograms are connected by crosses. each arm of the cross is constrained to be the same length and parallel to the opposite arm.

(fullscreen)  (swf file)