Spirograph Patterns

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Spirographs are implemented in the module Spirograph.py. You will also need

Explanation

Coming soon???

Examples

There are 14 samples which demonstrate the flexibility and scope of the spirograph modude. Some of the later ones generate very large bitmaps which are best appreciated if they are sent to a printer. The earlier ones can be viewed on the screen. Examples can be created by calling the 'example' function in the module, eg. Spirograph.example(2) will generate the second example. All examples are saved to bitmap files with the general name 'spirograph00001.bmp'. The examples are:

  0 => Draw the default pattern
  1 => Pattern 0, but with rotation and shrinkage
  2 => Higher resolution version of 1
  3 => Keeps the symmetry of the default pattern but changes the pattern
  4 => Similar to 0, but changes the relative sizes of the wheels
  5 => Changes the wheel sizes and rotates
  6 => Changes the wheel sizes and rotates
  7 => Adds in a third wheel
  8 => Vary the phase of the third wheel
  9 => Vary the phase of the 1st wheel in three wheel system
 10 => Vary the size of the third wheel in the three wheel system
 11 => An 8-fold symmetric 4 wheel pattern
 12 => Varying phase diagram for the previous 4 wheel pattern
101 => Creates the images for an animation of the previous pattern

The following images give a feel for what the examples are like but don't do justice to the full size versions.

Animation

Pattern 11 is generated using 4 wheels rotating around each other with varying speeds. The speeds have been chosen to give the pattern 8-fold symmetry. The 12th pattern is generated by superimposing a number of versions of pattern 11. The individual patterns only differ by the starting phase of one of the wheels. In patterns with more than 2 wheels the relative phases of the wheels can make a difference, this effect is missing in the standard two wheel spirograph. This animation (generated from the bitmaps produced by example 101) shows how varying the phase of the 2nd wheel in pattern 11 changes the shape of the whole.

Arty Farty

Here are a couple of images generated by passing the output from the examples above through Paintshop Pro's various images manipulations.