Octo Garden

This project has sold out! You can see the output HERE , or look for it on opensea HERE

Octo Garden is my first generative art project on the Art Blocks platform. It’s designed to generate fractal like spirals, resembling clumps of moss and lichen. Often, it’ll produce curled up structures, but occasionally it’ll fully unfurl into a beautiful Octopus. This page explains the features of the project, how it works, and some extra stuff available to collectors. But first, here’s a few outputs generated during the testing phase.

Generative System

Overview

Here’s some early gifs of the system getting on its feet. A certain number of circles is drawn onto the edge of a parent circle. The process repeats with ever smaller circles. Circles remember their parents and the angle they rotated relative to it. Therefore they can find the same parent again next iteration. This creates a large variety of structural forms. The main variables in the system are:

Seed

The global seed is determined from the token generated when the image is created. First it determines the angle of rotation per iteration, and the parent circle to add onto.

Iteration Count

The iteration count is how many times the system will repeat. The scatter points are how many circles to add per iteration.

Taper A

Alters the midpoint of the taper over the iterations. At high levels this clumps the structure together tighter.

Taper B

Another way of altering the size of the circle over the course of the iterations. This tends to blunt the ends of the tentacles and reduce the scale difference between each iteration.

Features

The structures are organized into 3 main types of Octo Garden with properties unique to each There are also 3 special infant types, which are much rarer. Each type has many different structures and forms it can take.

Smooth - Tentacles are smoothly rotated. Scatter Points are high.

Jagged - Tentacles are more disorganized and angular shapes are created in the clumped sections.

Tight - Lower Scatter Points, often producing more blunted Octo Gardens.

Egg - Points are pulled to the center, waiting to unfurl.

New Born - The egg has begun to grow, small structures may appear.

Toddler - Further developed. There is a higher chance of a tentacle protrusion here.

Palette

Octo Gardens are made from 8 main palettes.

Additionally, there is a light and dark background variant for each palette. Images can also be framed (image zoomed in on tentacle endpoints), or complete. (entire structure visible)

Houdini Link

One unique aspect of the project is that I have an exact copy of the code running in Houdini. Art Blocks creates a token when the image is minted, and if you enter that same token into Houdini, an identical Octo Garden is created. It’s then available to be fully raytraced. Here’s an example of an Octo Garden image with the Houdini version on the left and the P5js version on the right. Any owner of a Octo Garden image can get in touch with me, and I’ll happily render them a version of their Octo Garden from Houdini. Still images are rendered in print rez 4000x4000.