How do I automate "web"-based map

[Fractale]

Hello everyone,

Firstly, I would like to thank you for all that content. It allows creators to greatly expand their ideas.

Context :

I'm actually building up an artistic collective based on the idea of the "rhizome". It comes from french philosophers Deleuze & Guattari and express a system that aren't based on a "root". Instead of a center, there's multiple lines that draw movement & path. It's a very interesting concept that can be found in the book "A thousand plateaus" for the one who're interested in.

Question :

To materialize this concept, we're building up an internet website. To be more clear, I want to make a visual representation of that concept : it could looks like a "web", or a "galactic sky", with points & lines spread apart and connected to each other. I know how to "handcraft" it with THE GIMP, but :

1. Is there a way to automate the process ? i.e. something that could generate these kind of patterns.
2. A 2 dimensional picture would be great, but at some point we imagine this as an animated 3d picture. Is there a tool that can do that ?

Thanks.

[Tenia]

Hi Fractale and welcome ! I might be out of line but you could look at (social) network analysis softwares... One out of many that comes to mind is Gephi (https://gephi.org/) Yed editor which I use at work has also good features (but less graphical capacities) and accept many input and output formats.

[Fractale]

Awesome, thanks. Seems interesting for my project.

[Redrobes]

Image Magick and some kind of scripting language like python or perl could do it. You could run the script offline and generate all of the images and serve them in a normal web server or you could run the script as part of CGI or PHP based thing on a web server that could serve up the images dynamically. If the content is only lines and circles, like in the image above, then you could do it with a scripting language and then use it to write SVG graphics and the local machine browser would render them dynamically. Finally you could use browser based WebGL to do it.

The ability for it to be animated comes down to processing speed of a local machine if the content is dynamic or the amount of images and the bandwidth if you render the images offline.

[RobA]

Processing https://processing.org/ would also let you construct such images, even in 3D, and move a camera around it to render 2D variants.

-Rob A>