Levitated | Bone Piles, a computational sketch

Bone Pile is a structure generator, producing geometric arrangements of organic shapes.

Shapes resemble bone piles and consist of seven unique, hand drawn bones. Individual bones are scaled and rotated arbitrarily. Pile arrangements - generated structures - increase in complexity as one moves from the top left to the bottom right corner. This is a direct result of the iterative process used to create them.

Click anywhere in the bone piles to generate a new arrangement.

figure the seven unique bone fragments from which all unique structures are generated

Complex organic constructs, simple code.The collection of

interactive illustration click above. This bone pile contains individual bones that ease into their destination rotations, scales, and opacities.

bone piles is iteratively generated. Using three nested loops, a single object is attached to the stage a great number of times. The outside two loops iterate a fixed number of times as defined by the row and column dimensions (in this case, 6 and 12 respectively). The inside loop iterates a variable number of times directly dependent on the current progress through the outside loops. The more times the inside loop iterates, the greater the number of bones placed at that particular row and column.

With each new instantiation, the bone is given unique attributes computed at random and according to the progress of the iteration. Both rotation and scale are set in this fashion. As a final, important step, the instantiated movieclip is set to randomly goto and stop on one of its frames. This allows a palette of unique graphic shapes (bones) to be a part of the construction while keeping the code simple. Simple code is good.

figure across the stage, bone piles increase in complexity as their grid position moves down and right

Arranging rock, plant, and bone in a computational plane is easier to clean up.

jtarbell, September 2002