Don Havey

A couple of years ago I was walking home from work and thinking about how writing to a blog is often a one-way process. Like talking to a wall. The most important part of the process, for most bloggers, is the creation of an entry: the release of words. The importance of readability decreases quickly after an entry has been written. Frequently it is an introspective process, like writing to a diary or talking to yourself.

I thought, I would like to create objects from blog entries. Objects that would contain the words in the entry and grow as more words are added, but remain illegible, thereby deemphasizing the creation of a document.

To make a long story short: I decided that a tree would be an appropriate object: it grows in a recognizable fashion and can expand nearly indefinitely. The lettertree concept was born.

This tutorial will explain how I approached the lettertree problem. It relies on our existing Tree class. We’ll create paths from the root of the tree to each “bud” and randomly select one of these paths to carry a letter. We’ll also increase the thickness of the tree branches as the thing grows.

Here’s what it looks like: The final result

Here’s what you need: Lettertree classes

Note that like many of the applets I post, I’ve switched the rendering method from OpenGL to P3D for the in-browser sample. The OpenGL results will look way better and (typically) run faster within the Processing environment, but the latest version of the Java plugin is so immensely bloated that P3D seems to render faster in a browser.

Ready to begin?

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