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Show HN: Art – draw one stroke, let symmetry complete it
- aghilmort 22d agolots of fun! like etch-a-sketch, lite-brite, spirograph, paint, etc. on steroids!!
- albinn 27d agoCool! I got a weird feeling when playing with it, it's just something very satisfying in seeing it be completed
- aussieguy1234 22d agoNow we just need the mobile app
- arist0tl3 22d agoThe actual drawing experience is really satisfying. A couple usability tweaks I did just fiddling in the DOM: - Put the output and inputs side by side - Put the "actions", export, clear, etc. pinned to the bottom - The overall goal being zero scrolling After that it was quite fun and I enjoyed the options you gave for things like brush size, metallics, gradients, etc. Nice!
- Gualdrapo 22d agofwiw Krita has a similar setting in its brush tool - you draw a stroke and said brush stroke is mirrored by a given x axis or a given y axis (or both)
- andybak 22d agoHa! I added a similar feature to Open Brush: https://docs.openbrush.app/user-guide/multimirror https://docs.openbrush.app/user-guide/multimirror And learned a bit about group theory in the process... :-/ ( https://github.com/IxxyXR/unity-symmetry https://github.com/IxxyXR/unity-symmetry )
- catoc 22d agoCool! I made a similar thing for my kids (they wanted something similar to the kaleidoscopic drawing you can do in some ‘Monument Valley’ levels https://mirror-it.staticdomains.app/index.html https://mirror-it.staticdomains.app/index.html
- Wowfunhappy 22d agoI love this!!
- andai 22d agoVery cool. I like how it erases the oldest bit as you go along.
- detritus 22d agoI bookmarked OP's link for specifically for my kid, but I think she'll much prefer your version, simpler and clearer as it is - thank you so much!
- wuhhh 22d ago[dead]
- GavinMcG 22d agoWhen I scroll down to select a different color for my next stroke, the canvas often resets. Edit: or rather undoes the last stroke (which looks like resetting when it goes from 1 to 0).
- tobr 22d agoSame for me, while the actual clear button, ironically, does not work reliably.
- thraxil 22d ago"Mirror" mode was my favorite feature on the Koala Pad app back in the 1980s.
- larodi 22d agoHm... is this technically a mandala? I mean - does it suffice for something to have radial symmetry to be called a mandala?
- pickleglitch 22d agoTechnically, no. Colloquially, maybe.
- abhishxk1 22d agoBro this is hypnotic lol i spent 15 mins on this without even realising
- fiskeben 22d agoI spent a lot of time playing with a similar tool in Deluxe Paint as a kid.
- ElCapitanMarkla 22d agoI spent hours playing with that tool
- fractorial 22d agoAs a programmer, maths researcher, and painter, there’s certainly something satisfying (to me) when an artistically symmetrical piece observes no mathematical symmetry: The very asymmetry in the language used to describe it is, in and of itself, beautiful.
- gilleain 22d agoNot sure what you mean by "an artistically symmetrical piece observes no mathematical symmetry" - as in, the underlying structure has a (set of) symmetries but the 'decoration' on top is asymmetric?
- Caracas288 22d agoMaybe they are talking about physical mandalas?
- timbaiguzhinov 22d agoEven with the perfect math, i made it ugly, lol. But it got me hypnotized, spent 10 minutes in a blink of an eye.
- OttoZ05 22d agowe clearly need the mobile app
- Jaxan 22d agoI looked in the AppStore for “symmetry draw”, and there are at least 10 such apps.
- wky 22d agoThis reminded me of such good memories of playing with http://weavesilk.com/ http://weavesilk.com/. Nice to see someone with a similar concept.
- andai 22d agoWoah. The things we can do nowadays!
- smusamashah 22d agoThe control panel should have been on the side instead of below the image. I scroll to bottom, mandalla disappears on top in the screen, I click generate, then I scroll back up, repeat.
- reake 22d ago[dead]
- nayuki 22d agoI experimented with this concept over a decade ago: https://www.nayuki.io/page/symmetry-sketcher-javascript https://www.nayuki.io/page/symmetry-sketcher-javascript I was probably inspired by mouse-painting tools in Corel Photo-Paint (like Adobe Photoshop) that have an "orbits" feature. https://product.corel.com/help/PHOTO-PAINT/540111130/Main/EN/Documentation/wwhelp/wwhimpl/common/html/wwhelp.htm#href=Corel-PHOTO-PAINT-Painting-symmetrical-patterns-and-orbits.html&single=true https://product.corel.com/help/PHOTO-PAINT/540111130/Main/EN...
- intrasight 22d agoFeature request it would be fun to draw snowflakes but to do that there'd have to be another setting to constrain things you draw to be straight lines at just the angles that ice crystals would allow.
- paulhebert 22d agoThis is a very different approach and UI but you may enjoy this snowflake generator I made and wrote about a few years ago: https://cloudfour.com/thinks/coding-a-snowflake-generator/ https://cloudfour.com/thinks/coding-a-snowflake-generator/
- wuhhh 22d ago[dead]
- aaroninsf 22d agoSuggestion OP if you would like one: Support click-and-spin with momentum: I clicked outside the mandala and quick-dragged horizontally, hoping this would spin the mandala. You could support zero-friction and momentum, slowly stopping. In either this unlocks a dramatically new aesthetic: clicking on the rotating surface draws splines. The mapping of gesture-to-line (hence mandala elements) changes completely. There are some complications, intuitively one might expect "pottery wheel mode" where symmetry is not enabled... I think that would be "unlearned" however.
- kazinator 22d agoI'm like: Neat! I will show this to my small kids. Wait, nope; they already know how to make mandala coasters offline with scissors and paper.
- dmd 22d agoLove this. I had something almost identical on my Commodore 64 40 years ago that you could use with the joystick or KoalaPad.
- VVIQ2 22d agoNice! Kinda reminds me this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirograph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirograph