Category: Programming

Honestly, they’re incredibly interesting. Anyway, I’ll skip straight to the pièce de résistance: This is a 4-curve cubic Bézier spline modulated onto an ellipse. The ellipse [a=4, b=3] is at an angle of π/4. C1 continuity of the complete curve is preserved. The flickr set tells the story of how I got here. This is… Continue reading Even more on ellipses and splines

After some code cleanup and generalisation, I can now modulate whole splines onto ellipses and onto splines themselves. Here is my simple 4-bezier spline modulated onto an ellipse: And onto itself: Repeatedly modulating a spline onto itself while varying the frequency parameter leads to some interesting and fractal patterns. Nice.

My efforts to equally subdivide a curve along its length have, in part, been leading to this. First, I extended the sampling to work with splines (made up of cubic Bézier curves with c1 continuity). This shot shows 4 curves put together to form a spline: Next, I wrote some code to modulate a curve… Continue reading Splines and modulation

Since I already had the binary search and interpolation code, it was just a matter of writing different samplers for ellipses and Bézier curves. ;; make a sampler function for a bezier curve (defun make-bezier-sampler (p0 p1 p2 p3) (lambda (k) (decasteljau p0 p1 p2 p3 k))) ;; make a sampler function for an ellipse… Continue reading And it was done

I think I will use the same method as I do for Bézier curves to step along the circumference. Another generalisation I had to make from the circle code is with respect to the normal. For a circle of radius r, centred on the origin, and parameterised by angle θ, a point on the circle… Continue reading More on ellipses

Having conquered equidistant spacing along a Bézier curve, my thoughts now turn to the same problem for an ellipse. I have solved the problem for a circle of course, which is a special case of an ellipse. One would think that going from a circle to an ellipse would be mathematically easy: it’s easy to… Continue reading On ellipses

As you know, a Bézier curve (here meaning specifically a cubic Bézier) is often used for drawing all kinds of things in vector graphics. It has the nice property that the endpoints and control points form a bounding box, and deCasteljau’s algorithm is a nice numerically stable way of evaluating the curve at a particular… Continue reading Experimenting with (cubic) Bézier subdivision