jacobmake » Illustrator http://www.jacobmake.com I have creative ADD Tue, 17 Aug 2010 22:15:24 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 Generating Topo Map Lines http://www.jacobmake.com/2008/05/generating-topo-map-lines/ http://www.jacobmake.com/2008/05/generating-topo-map-lines/#comments Sun, 01 Jun 2008 02:10:11 +0000 jacobmake http://www.jacobmake.com/?p=73 The last few days I’ve immersed myself in Math. I’ve been trying to figure out a way to generate lines that mimic topography with the ActionScript 3 Drawing API. I studied the math that goes into bezier cubic and quadratic curves, and investigated a little bit in Sin waves. All I ended up with was a headache. I built some line generators but they didn’t really FEEL like topography.

Then I had a eureka moment.

“I’ll use the bitmapData class, blur me some bitmap data. Then I could loop through and select pixel groups by value and trace out the groups!”

Then I had another eureka moment. (Two in one day, it was amazing.)

“Someone already did this, it’s called Live Trace and it lives in Adobe Illustrator.”

So here is what I did. I took this image. Then I killed the saturation, blurred it out and tweaked the contrast to get this;

Then I ran it through Live Trace with a grayscale setting and colors set to about 25. And it came out looking a lot like a topo map.

Pretty Topo Lines

I think I could still do something siimilar in AS with the Bitmap data class, and maybe I will just to prove it to myself I can.

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