Techniques: distance field, Perlin noise, domain warping, marching square. Fountain pen on Watercolor A4 paper.

Techniques: distance field, Perlin noise, domain warping, marching square. Fountain pen on Watercolor A4 paper.

Red Blue Field Overlap

Mint Red Field Overlap

Distance Field Black Castle

Distance Field Starship

Diamond Ship Overlap

Distance Field Square Overlap

Distance Field Intersection

Distance Field Colombus

Distance Field Aurora Borealis Ship

Distance Field Blue Diamond

Distance Field Blue Flower

Distance Field Yellow Flower

Distance Field Turquoise Rock

Distance Field Black Rock

Distance Field Amethyst Rock

Distance Field Indigo Rock

Techniques: distance field, Perlin noise, domain warping, marching square. Fountain pen on Watercolor A4 paper.
The glitch that happened at the end wasn&#39;t planned but gives a nice touch.

Distance Field Vanishing Ring

Distance Field Rock

Techniques: distance field, Perlin noise, domain warping, marching square. &#39;Amazing Amethyst&#39; ink from Diamine. Fountain pen on Watercolor A4 paper.

Techniques: distance field, Perlin noise, domain warping, marching square. 'Amazing Amethyst' ink from Diamine. Fountain pen on Watercolor A4 paper.

Distance Field Mask

Distance Field

Erosion02

Moving average on 1000 digits of π

<ul>
<li>More information about Pattern03: <a href="https://greweb.me/2021/08/pattern-03">https://greweb.me/2021/08/pattern-03</a></li>
<li>Digital mint: <a href="https://ethblock.art/view/7184">https://ethblock.art/view/7184</a></li>
</ul>

one of the plot of 888s 'Pattern 03' mints

Pattern03 #7184

<ul>
<li>More information about Pattern03: <a href="https://greweb.me/2021/08/pattern-03">https://greweb.me/2021/08/pattern-03</a></li>
<li>Digital mint: <a href="https://ethblock.art/view/7172">https://ethblock.art/view/7172</a></li>
</ul>

Pattern03 #7172

<ul>
<li>More information about Pattern03: <a href="https://greweb.me/2021/08/pattern-03">https://greweb.me/2021/08/pattern-03</a></li>
<li>Digital mint: <a href="https://ethblock.art/view/7108">https://ethblock.art/view/7108</a></li>
</ul>

Pattern03 #7108

<ul>
<li>More information about Pattern03: <a href="https://greweb.me/2021/08/pattern-03">https://greweb.me/2021/08/pattern-03</a></li>
<li>Digital mint: <a href="https://ethblock.art/view/7086">https://ethblock.art/view/7086</a></li>
</ul>

Pattern03 #7086

<ul>
<li>More information about Pattern03: <a href="https://greweb.me/2021/08/pattern-03">https://greweb.me/2021/08/pattern-03</a></li>
<li>Digital mint: <a href="https://ethblock.art/view/7043">https://ethblock.art/view/7043</a></li>
</ul>

Pattern03 #7043

<ul>
<li>More information about Pattern03: <a href="https://greweb.me/2021/08/pattern-03">https://greweb.me/2021/08/pattern-03</a></li>
<li>Digital mint: <a href="https://ethblock.art/view/7040">https://ethblock.art/view/7040</a></li>
</ul>

Pattern03 #7040

<ul>
<li>More information about Pattern03: <a href="https://greweb.me/2021/08/pattern-03">https://greweb.me/2021/08/pattern-03</a></li>
<li>Digital mint: <a href="https://ethblock.art/view/7028">https://ethblock.art/view/7028</a></li>
</ul>

Pattern03 #7028

<ul>
<li>More information about Pattern03: <a href="https://greweb.me/2021/08/pattern-03">https://greweb.me/2021/08/pattern-03</a></li>
<li>Digital mint: <a href="https://ethblock.art/view/7025">https://ethblock.art/view/7025</a></li>
</ul>

Pattern03 #7025

<ul>
<li>More information about Pattern03: <a href="https://greweb.me/2021/08/pattern-03">https://greweb.me/2021/08/pattern-03</a></li>
<li>Digital mint: <a href="https://ethblock.art/view/6950">https://ethblock.art/view/6950</a></li>
</ul>

Pattern03 #6950

<ul>
<li>More information about Pattern03: <a href="https://greweb.me/2021/08/pattern-03">https://greweb.me/2021/08/pattern-03</a></li>
<li>Digital mint: <a href="https://ethblock.art/view/6935">https://ethblock.art/view/6935</a></li>
</ul>

Pattern03 #6935

<ul>
<li>More information about Pattern03: <a href="https://greweb.me/2021/08/pattern-03">https://greweb.me/2021/08/pattern-03</a></li>
<li>Digital mint: <a href="https://ethblock.art/view/6879">https://ethblock.art/view/6879</a></li>
</ul>

Pattern03 #6879

<ul>
<li>More information about Pattern03: <a href="https://greweb.me/2021/08/pattern-03">https://greweb.me/2021/08/pattern-03</a></li>
<li>Digital mint: <a href="https://ethblock.art/view/6839">https://ethblock.art/view/6839</a></li>
</ul>

Pattern03 #6839

<ul>
<li>More information about Pattern03: <a href="https://greweb.me/2021/08/pattern-03">https://greweb.me/2021/08/pattern-03</a></li>
<li>Digital mint: <a href="https://ethblock.art/view/6824">https://ethblock.art/view/6824</a></li>
</ul>

Pattern03 #6824

<ul>
<li>More information about Pattern03: <a href="https://greweb.me/2021/08/pattern-03">https://greweb.me/2021/08/pattern-03</a></li>
<li>Digital mint: <a href="https://ethblock.art/view/6808">https://ethblock.art/view/6808</a></li>
</ul>

Pattern03 #6808

<ul>
<li>More information about Pattern03: <a href="https://greweb.me/2021/08/pattern-03">https://greweb.me/2021/08/pattern-03</a></li>
<li>Digital mint: <a href="https://ethblock.art/view/6807">https://ethblock.art/view/6807</a></li>
</ul>

Pattern03 #6807

<ul>
<li>More information about Pattern03: <a href="https://greweb.me/2021/08/pattern-03">https://greweb.me/2021/08/pattern-03</a></li>
<li>Digital mint: <a href="https://ethblock.art/view/6804">https://ethblock.art/view/6804</a></li>
</ul>

Pattern03 #6804

<ul>
<li>More information about Pattern03: <a href="https://greweb.me/2021/08/pattern-03">https://greweb.me/2021/08/pattern-03</a></li>
<li>Digital mint: <a href="https://ethblock.art/view/6800">https://ethblock.art/view/6800</a></li>
</ul>

Pattern03 #6800

<ul>
<li>More information about Pattern03: <a href="https://greweb.me/2021/08/pattern-03">https://greweb.me/2021/08/pattern-03</a></li>
<li>Digital mint: <a href="https://ethblock.art/view/6782">https://ethblock.art/view/6782</a></li>
</ul>

Pattern03 #6782

<ul>
<li>More information about Pattern03: <a href="https://greweb.me/2021/08/pattern-03">https://greweb.me/2021/08/pattern-03</a></li>
<li>Digital mint: <a href="https://ethblock.art/view/6748">https://ethblock.art/view/6748</a></li>
</ul>

Pattern03 #6748

<ul>
<li>More information about Pattern03: <a href="https://greweb.me/2021/08/pattern-03">https://greweb.me/2021/08/pattern-03</a></li>
<li>Digital mint: <a href="https://ethblock.art/view/6739">https://ethblock.art/view/6739</a></li>
</ul>

Pattern03 #6739

<ul>
<li>More information about Pattern03: <a href="https://greweb.me/2021/08/pattern-03">https://greweb.me/2021/08/pattern-03</a></li>
<li>Digital mint: <a href="https://ethblock.art/view/6663">https://ethblock.art/view/6663</a></li>
</ul>

Pattern03 #6663

<ul>
<li>More information about Pattern03: <a href="https://greweb.me/2021/08/pattern-03">https://greweb.me/2021/08/pattern-03</a></li>
<li>Digital mint: <a href="https://ethblock.art/view/6636">https://ethblock.art/view/6636</a></li>
</ul>

Pattern03 #6636

<ul>
<li>More information about Pattern03: <a href="https://greweb.me/2021/08/pattern-03">https://greweb.me/2021/08/pattern-03</a></li>
<li>Digital mint: <a href="https://ethblock.art/view/6573">https://ethblock.art/view/6573</a></li>
</ul>

Pattern03 #6573

<ul>
<li>More information about Pattern03: <a href="https://greweb.me/2021/08/pattern-03">https://greweb.me/2021/08/pattern-03</a></li>
<li>Digital mint: <a href="https://ethblock.art/view/6524">https://ethblock.art/view/6524</a></li>
</ul>

Pattern03 #6524

<ul>
<li>More information about Pattern03: <a href="https://greweb.me/2021/08/pattern-03">https://greweb.me/2021/08/pattern-03</a></li>
<li>Digital mint: <a href="https://ethblock.art/view/6515">https://ethblock.art/view/6515</a></li>
</ul>

Pattern03 #6515

<ul>
<li>More information about Pattern03: <a href="https://greweb.me/2021/08/pattern-03">https://greweb.me/2021/08/pattern-03</a></li>
<li>Digital mint: <a href="https://ethblock.art/view/6436">https://ethblock.art/view/6436</a></li>
</ul>

Pattern03 #6436

<ul>
<li>More information about Pattern03: <a href="https://greweb.me/2021/08/pattern-03">https://greweb.me/2021/08/pattern-03</a></li>
<li>Digital mint: <a href="https://ethblock.art/view/6433">https://ethblock.art/view/6433</a></li>
</ul>

Pattern03 #6433

<ul>
<li>More information about Pattern03: <a href="https://greweb.me/2021/08/pattern-03">https://greweb.me/2021/08/pattern-03</a></li>
<li>Digital mint: <a href="https://ethblock.art/view/6427">https://ethblock.art/view/6427</a></li>
</ul>

Pattern03 #6427

<ul>
<li>More information about Pattern03: <a href="https://greweb.me/2021/08/pattern-03">https://greweb.me/2021/08/pattern-03</a></li>
<li>Digital mint: <a href="https://ethblock.art/view/6396">https://ethblock.art/view/6396</a></li>
</ul>

Pattern03 #6396

<ul>
<li>More information about Pattern03: <a href="https://greweb.me/2021/08/pattern-03">https://greweb.me/2021/08/pattern-03</a></li>
<li>Digital mint: <a href="https://ethblock.art/view/6357">https://ethblock.art/view/6357</a></li>
</ul>

Pattern03 #6357

<ul>
<li>More information about Pattern03: <a href="https://greweb.me/2021/08/pattern-03">https://greweb.me/2021/08/pattern-03</a></li>
<li>Digital mint: <a href="https://ethblock.art/view/6308">https://ethblock.art/view/6308</a></li>
</ul>

Pattern03 #6308

Joyful eye

Stippling technique on my beloved wife&#39;s eye. Using two different inks.

Stippling technique on my beloved wife's eye. Using two different inks.

Bi-color eye

Stippling technique made of 40&#39;000 strokes plotted in 6 hours with fountain pen and Diamine Indigo ink on watercolor paper.
Strokes follow a vector field simply driven by the formula <code>atan(x,y)</code>.

Stippling technique made of 40'000 strokes plotted in 6 hours with fountain pen and Diamine Indigo ink on watercolor paper.

My king

Forgotten mountain moons

Green mountains

Forgotten mountains

One of my earliest exploration of packing and contouring.

Forgotten contouring

<img width="100%" src="/images/plots/231b.jpg">

It has been a great journey since <a href="/plots/162">plot#162</a>. This is one of the early prototype.

Forgotten squares warping

Contouring Molotow Test

Waves

Stippling technique made of 30&#39;000 strokes plotted in 4.5 hours with fountain pen and Parker Quink ink on watercolor paper.
Strokes follow a vector field simply driven by the formula <code>atan(x,y)</code>.
Photo of a lemur I&#39;ve taken at <a href="https://www.parcs-zoologiques-lumigny.fr/">Parc des Félins (fr)</a>.

Stippling technique made of 30'000 strokes plotted in 4.5 hours with fountain pen and Parker Quink ink on watercolor paper.

Lémurien

Pink bodies

Turquoise bodies

Field

Eye field

One of my first exploration of this technique using different lines that diverges when there are more color to print.
Plot tribute to <a href="https://ethblock.art/create/19">https://ethblock.art/create/19</a> which completed.

Pattern 02 plot

There are a lot of noise all around. Bitcoin doesn&#39;t care. in code we trust.

Bitcoin in noisy terrain

Noisy terrain

Forgotten because it&#39;s one of the earliest prototype I had on the concept.

Twin mountains

This is a fresh experiment with raymarching distance function, fully rewritten in Rust, combined with some recent &quot;elevation&quot; algorithm.

Raymarched objects

Eye Variant

Dense Circles Nesting

Similar technique as all the elevation exploration with a &quot;min&quot; applied on the noise to make some steps appearing.

Step elevation

Ring packing

Simple elevation that have an interesting waving effect.

Waving elevation

Squares Noise Packing

This plot was made for fun as a contest I did for colleagues, where I asked how much meters of fountain pen ink was used in this. The answer was 93.38 meters.
That plot is gifted to a colleague who estimated at 100 meters.
<pre><code>Estimated print time: 1:39:35 (Hours, minutes, seconds)
Length of path to draw: 93.38 m.
Pen-up travel distance: 289.31 m.
Total movement distance: 382.69 m.
</code></pre>

Crimson & Indigo Squares

Square Spiral Packing

Diagonal Stroke Packing

Cross Stroke Packing

Pentagon Spiral Packing

Blue Spiral Packing

The best part of generative art is accumulating techniques and improving your creative coding skills. You explore your imagination and can combine different ideas and techniques over time once you have &quot;absorbed&quot; them in our playbook. IF you know N techniques, one more technique is now giving you <code>N*(N+1)</code> possibilities of outcomes. They can all be crossed over and combined together to produce results. It&#39;s exponential.
Here is the combination of shape packing, applied to triangle polygon, filled with one of my oldest &quot;fill&quot; algorithm that works by rotating around randomly sampled points.

combination of shape packing, applied to polygon, filled with one of my oldest fill algorithm that works by rotating around randomly sampled points

triangle noise spiral

A variant of <a href="/plots/203">plot#203</a>.
<blockquote>
I like randomness a lot. Exploring the beauty of noise is also recreating Nature&#39;s pattern and trying to put back some order in that randomness.
</blockquote>

I like randomness a lot. Exploring the beauty of noise is also recreating Nature's pattern and trying to put back some order in that randomness.

Bloody circles & ordered noise

As you may notice, I like randomness a lot. Exploring the beauty of noise is also recreating Nature&#39;s pattern and trying to put back some order in that randomness.
This creation is an unusual version of &quot;circle packing&quot; that instead of a pure random distribution will run a few times to actually try to find the biggest circle to place. This makes the distribution less random and way more ordered. However, the fact there is a &quot;a few times&quot; maximum tries gives some room for some randomness and not &quot;pure order&quot;.
The algorithm at stake is relatively simple, I will have to improve it in future to parallelize the computation.
<pre><code class="language-rust">fn packing(
 seed: f64,
 iterations: usize,
 desired_count: usize,
 optimize_size: usize, // &lt;--- number of retries to optimize the size 
 pad: f64,
 container: &amp;VCircle,
 min_scale: f64,
 max_scale: f64,
) -&gt; Vec&lt;VCircle&gt; {
 let mut circles = Vec::new();
 let mut tries = Vec::new();
 let mut rng = rng_from_seed(seed);
 let x1 = container.x - container.r;
 let y1 = container.y - container.r;
 let x2 = container.x + container.r;
 let y2 = container.y + container.r;
 let max_scale = max_scale.min(container.r);
 for _i in 0..iterations {
 let x: f64 = rng.gen_range(x1, x2);
 let y: f64 = rng.gen_range(y1, y2);
 if let Some(size) = search_circle_radius(&amp;container, &amp;circles, x, y, min_scale, max_scale) {
 let circle = VCircle::new(x, y, size - pad);
 // innovation happens here, basically we keep pushing until we reach the nb
 tries.push(circle);
 if tries.len() &gt; optimize_size {
 // then we grab the biggest
 tries.sort_by(|a, b| b.r.partial_cmp(&amp;a.r).unwrap());
 let c = tries[0];
 circles.push(c.clone());
 tries = Vec::new();
 }
 }
 if circles.len() &gt; desired_count {
 break;
 }
 }
 circles
}
</code></pre>

circles recursion & ordered noise

@greweb&#39;s #12 plot loop. Taking the idea of <a href="/plots/198">plot#198</a> to the next level using an animated eye.
These are plotted (~ 2 hours each frame) with fountain pens and two inks (&#39;Bloody Brexit&#39; by Diamine and &#39;Writers Blood&#39; by Diamine) on a A4 watercolor paper (300g/m2).
The eye is mirrored with a different offset to make this duality. The title refers to the French expression &quot;œil pour œil, dent pour dent&quot; which means &quot;an eye for an eye&quot;.
<h3 id="making-of">Making of</h3>
I took a video of my wife eye and use this GIF as an input to my generator =)
<img src="/images/plots/202-input.gif" width="400">

The way to mix the two eyes is using a simple technique, using my own tool set:
<pre><code class="language-rust">let get_color_1 = image_gif_get_color(&quot;images/eye.gif&quot;, opts.index).unwrap();
let get_color_2 = image_gif_get_color(&quot;images/eye.gif&quot;, opts.index + 2).unwrap();
let f = |(x, y): (f64, f64)| {
 let p = (x, y);
 let c1 = get_color_1((p.0, p.1 + 0.2));
 let c2 = get_color_2((p.0, 1.2 - p.1));
 smoothstep(0.0, 1.0, grayscale(c1)) *
 smoothstep(0.0, 1.0, grayscale(c2))
};
</code></pre>

œil pour œil (4 frames)

Plotting 1000 digits of π. Y axis spreads from 0 to 9, X axis is the index of digits. Diamine &#39;Red Dragon&#39; ink with fontain pen on watercolor paper.

Plotting 1000 digits of π. the y axis spreads from 0 to 9, the x axis is the index of digits.

1000 digits of π

Today is 200th day of 2021. I started plotting on January 1 on a daily cycle, so let&#39;s celebrate this 200th plot. I&#39;m using here a very similar technique as explored in <a href="/plots/198">plots#198</a> with even more tight lines and different settings used in combination with a coffee cup photo. 
This plot is a tribute to artist Sean M Puckett (<a href="https://twitter.com/PhotoPuck">@PhotoPluck</a> on Twitter), who I consider an incredible artist of the plotting scene. They are frequently releasing impressive photo-driven plots, pushing the boundaries of what can be done with fountain pens. Please check their work on <a href="https://twitter.com/PhotoPuck">https://twitter.com/PhotoPuck</a>.
I like their regular &quot;Monday coffee plot&quot; that I wanted to celebrate.

Monday coffee

This plot combines circle packing meets 2d sampling sorted by (x+y). Diamine &#39;Bloody Brexit&#39; on A4 watercolor paper.
It took 2 hours to draw with a fountain pen that ran 111 meters of ink!

This plot combines circle packing with sorted connected random lines technique. Diamine 'Bloody Brexit' on A4 watercolor paper.

oblique doodle packing

Using layered lines combined with an eye photo with two fountain pens on watercolor paper.

Using layered lines combined with an eye photo with two fountain pens on watercolor paper.

Eye 02

Eye 01

Brume means Mist in French. Diamine Earl Grey ink on watercolor paper.

Brume means Mist in French. Diamine Earl Grey ink on watercolor paper.

Brume

@greweb&#39;s #11 plot loop. This is an highlight of the recent work, animated.

Dancing mountain (4 frames)

Usage of different harmonies of noise to reveal glitches. Various noise experiments and inks.
<img width="100%" src="/images/plots/194zoom.jpg">

<img width="100%" src="/images/plots/194b.jpg">

<img width="100%" src="/images/plots/194c.jpg">

Usage of different harmonies of noise to reveal glitches. Various noise experiments and inks.

Elevation glitch

Layering lines with noise with another noise to produce random stripe distribution. Parker Quint on Watercolour paper (300g/m).

Layering lines with noise with another noise to produce random stripe distribution. Parker Quint on Watercolour paper (300g/m).

Striped mountain

Continuation of noise elevation. Fountain pens with various inks on watercolour paper (300g/m).
Two other experiments done and much more will follow because it&#39;s a great concept:
<img src="/images/plots/192b.jpg" width="100%" />
<img src="/images/plots/192c.jpg" width="100%" />

Continuation of noise elevation. Fountain pens with various inks on watercolour paper (300g/m).

Colored mountains 01

- [Pre-release article](/2021/08/pattern-03)
- [Post article: Part 1: covering the rarity aspects](/2021/08/the-day-after-pattern-03)
- [Post article: Part 2: covering the future plots](/2021/08/plotting-pattern-03)

> 🤗 **The ethblock.art BlockStyle ['Pattern 03'](https://ethblock.art/style/32) sold out yesterday in only 2 hours with 888 pieces.** I still can't believe it. There are no words to describe how thankful I am for all your support. THANK YOU!

You can browse through the mints on [https://ethblock.art/style/32](https://ethblock.art/style/32).

As a first disclaimer, I will have to say it's nearly impossible to cover in this article all of the 888 or even to classify them, there are amazing discoveries. I will highlight some of them.

## Rarity in ethblock.art

With ethblock.art there is always a search for the rare piece. This happens because everyone wants to find the pearl that no one will have, the one that will be unique among them all. Nevertheless, the rarity often appears where no one expected. There is also a bit of game theory at play here: if everyone mints the same rarity, it's not reeeaaally rare anymore in the final collection. What makes a great piece ultimately is the general composition and the (relative) beauty of the piece. I would always recommend not necessarily to search for the "rarity by design" (by the BlockStyle creator rules) but to find something that you like with all these components at play.

In the case of 'Pattern 03', some very cool patterns emerged. Symmetry plays an important role to reveal it, like in Nature.

The metadata of OpenSea are still loading as we speak but I'm going to highlight a small analysis of what happened with some of the picks to explain it.

## Designed rarity of Pattern 03

There were a few elements that were covered yesterday (check the [Pre-release article](/2021/08/pattern-03)) and that took an important part yesterday.

### Crosshatch shape

This shape has been used relatively popularly as it's quite rare.

Here are many examples:


[*#6824 BY BITSIKKA.ETH* ![](/images/2021/08/picks/6824.png)](https://ethblock.art/view/6824)
[*#6739 BY 0X8A53...63CF* ![](/images/2021/08/picks/6739.png)](https://ethblock.art/view/6739)
[*#6813 BY 0XE20A...866E* ![](/images/2021/08/picks/6813.png)](https://ethblock.art/view/6813)
[*#6807 BY J0RDAN.ETH* ![](/images/2021/08/picks/6807.png)](https://ethblock.art/view/6807)
[*#6931 BY SETANIMALS.ETH* ![](/images/2021/08/picks/6931.png)](https://ethblock.art/view/6931)
[*#6611 BY KLEINTONNO.ETH* ![](/images/2021/08/picks/6611.png)](https://ethblock.art/view/6611)

### The symmetry

Symmetry helped a lot on revealing some human / animals patterns and let me highlight some.

[*#6991 BY 0X5A17...4A17* ![](/images/2021/08/picks/6991.png)](https://ethblock.art/view/6991)
[*#6958 BY 0XB84D...04D3* ![](/images/2021/08/picks/6958.png)](https://ethblock.art/view/6958)
[*#6766 BY BITSIKKA.ETH* ![](/images/2021/08/picks/6766.png)](https://ethblock.art/view/6766)
[*#6776 BY 0XB8BA...F556* ![](/images/2021/08/picks/6776.png)](https://ethblock.art/view/6776)
[*#6778 BY 0X27F8...269B* ![](/images/2021/08/picks/6778.png)](https://ethblock.art/view/6778)
[*#6766 BY BITSIKKA.ETH* ![](/images/2021/08/picks/6766.png)](https://ethblock.art/view/6766)
[*#7154 BY 0X2D55...8034* ![](/images/2021/08/picks/7154.png)](https://ethblock.art/view/7154)
[*#6808 BY 0X3037...CF6E* ![](/images/2021/08/picks/6808.png)](https://ethblock.art/view/6808)
[*#6817 BY 0XE63E...1D85* ![](/images/2021/08/picks/6817.png)](https://ethblock.art/view/6817)

### inks used

As I expected, black was the most common ink used. It's pretty good to get nice contrasts, especially on important patterns.

Black is 25% of plots, then comes "Bloody Brexit" ink which is a dark blue (about 10%). then the great "Red Dragon" which is a strong red (about 8%). Then indigo and turquoise take about 5% each.

I don't have precise stats because OpenSea is still indexing.

### colors-duality

About 20% of the picks are using two colors so it was an undeniable search from minters.

I was very interested by the combination of colors that were chosen, some I had never considered in the past and it truely was a revelation to me on some ink coupling to try more in future.

[*#6824 BY BITSIKKA.ETH* ![](/images/2021/08/picks/6815.png)](https://ethblock.art/view/6815)

[*#7000 BY PLAYPAUSESTOP.ETH* ![](/images/2021/08/picks/7000.png)](https://ethblock.art/view/7000)

[*#7013 BY 0X81E5...5D63* ![](/images/2021/08/picks/7013.png)](https://ethblock.art/view/7013)

[*#6790 BY 0XB8BA...F556* ![](/images/2021/08/picks/6790.png)](https://ethblock.art/view/6790)

[*#6832 BY 0X42AD...B84E* ![](/images/2021/08/picks/6832.png)](https://ethblock.art/view/6832)

[*#7030 BY 0X6E82...918E* ![](/images/2021/08/picks/7030.png)](https://ethblock.art/view/7030)

[*#6637 BY 0XB8BA...F556* ![](/images/2021/08/picks/6637.png)](https://ethblock.art/view/6637)

## Undocumented rarity of Pattern 03

There were a few surprises that I didn't document but that some of you found out!

### "partial" lines

Another dimension of the "colors duality" is actually to have the second color not plotted at all, it makes it back to one color but with part of the pattern that is simply disabled.

It's about as rare as having a dual color. And it was used by a few pieces.

**it allowed to keep only one line here:**

[*#6777 BY 0X44DC...F3BD* ![](/images/2021/08/picks/6777.png)](https://ethblock.art/view/6777)
[*#6736 BY 0X04C4...A644* ![](/images/2021/08/picks/6736.png)](https://ethblock.art/view/6736)

there are many other examples of "partial" lines.

### The "strikethrough" lines.

I've made it possible that on top of borders, there would be some strikethrough lines. It was both a really rare feature and also very hard to use properly in a way that it's really estetic. It allows to "divide" the space of the canvas.

Here are technically all the possible strikethrough:

<img src="/images/2021/08/strikethrough.jpg" width="400"/>

Here is a prototype plot that shows how lines blends:

<img src="/images/2021/08/strikethrough-pic.jpg" width="400"/>

It's not easy to "simulate" in the digital version and be 1:1 with the physical result because all the parameters at stake with the fountain pen, ink and paper.

Technically, the SVG have a lot of lines that goes back and forth to achieve this:

<img src="/images/2021/08/strikethrough-spec.png" width="800"/>

One of the mint:

[*#6979 BY 0XBA29...0345* ![](/images/2021/08/picks/6979.png)](https://ethblock.art/view/6979)

### Ink saturation

One of the important feature I developed was to try to simulate the effect of important amount of ink. This is something you can see at stake in https://mountainofink.com/blog/diamine-pink which is one of the ink I use.

Here are 3 examples:

[*#6802 BY 0X04C4...A644* ![](/images/2021/08/picks/6802.png)](https://ethblock.art/view/6802)
[*#6804 BY 0XAE68...FBE3* ![](/images/2021/08/picks/6804.png)](https://ethblock.art/view/6804)
[*#6800 BY 0XE20A...866E* ![](/images/2021/08/picks/6800.png)](https://ethblock.art/view/6800)

that last one will be particularly interesting to plot because of the "red-ish" effect of that ink.

### Curly loops: a rarity that wasn't found! (correct me if i'm wrong)

There were a rare possibility that the displacement would have been so high that it would have make lines curly.

This was in the prototype:

<img src="/images/2021/08/picks/curly.png" width="400"/>

I have to admit this property is pushing the plotting to a certain extreme because small curls often will be too hard for the paper and the pen will start digging through it. So i'm relief 50% of the plots are not like this. 😅

## Organic rarity

There are rarity aspects that happened organically and that I didn't planned or anticipate at all. That is the beauty of generative art in general. It goes beyond its creator.

### low/stable `f` noise values

(refer to [first article](/2021/08/pattern-03) for explanation of `f`)

While there were indeed a possibility for the `f` value to go low or having a very similar value, I didn't anticipate it would be used as a feature and having other factors (e.g. `displacement`)

So these art appear to not have `f` noises at all:

(fun fact, this block was minted [3 times!](https://opensea.io/collection/blockart?search[stringTraits][0][name]=BlockNumber&search[stringTraits][0][values][0]=13115508))
[*#7025 BY 0X91D7...28B3* ![](/images/2021/08/picks/7025.png)](https://ethblock.art/view/7025)

as well as this one which nearly have no `f` but have an heavy cos displacement and a pattern I never expected:

[*#7182 BY 0X7DB2...E04B* ![](/images/2021/08/picks/7182.png)](https://ethblock.art/view/7182)

There are a few similar pieces having these wavy displacement

[*#7193 BY 0X9422...17DF* ![](/images/2021/08/picks/7193.png)](https://ethblock.art/view/7193)
[*#6938 BY ZEROLIGHTING.ETH* ![](/images/2021/08/picks/6938.png)](https://ethblock.art/view/6938)

### Great usage of the "radial gradient"

One uncommon feature of the generator was to create concentric circles. It can happen either by "removing" or by "adding" into the `f` factor. It was curated in various interesting ways.

[*#7049 BY PSYCHOKILLER.ETH* ![](/images/2021/08/picks/7049.png)](https://ethblock.art/view/7049)
[*#7042 BY GABRIELLEMIC.ETH* ![](/images/2021/08/picks/7042.png)](https://ethblock.art/view/7042)
[*#7178 BY PBOCK.ETH* ![](/images/2021/08/picks/7178.png)](https://ethblock.art/view/7178)
[*#6714 BY 0XE20A...866E* ![](/images/2021/08/picks/6714.png)](https://ethblock.art/view/6714)

### Pushing the plots to their extreme

I'm not astonished that some mints pushed the generator to its extreme boundaries but some of the picks still surprised me.

**very low line resolution (mod5) with white holes:**

[*#7056 BY 0XBA29...0345* ![](/images/2021/08/picks/7056.png)](https://ethblock.art/view/7056)

**extreme displacement and f going beyond 1.0 (so it overlaps the next line)**

[*#7040 BY 0XD21A...100C* ![](/images/2021/08/picks/7040.png)](https://ethblock.art/view/7040)

**one liner**

[*#7151 BY 0X5AB4...BAD5* ![](/images/2021/08/picks/7151.png)](https://ethblock.art/view/7151)

**invisible art** (which funnily I tried to prevent but you still found one!)

[*#6900 BY 0X81E5...5D63* ![](/images/2021/08/picks/6900.png)](https://ethblock.art/view/6900)

**extreme amount of lines**

[*#6640 BY 0X8A53...63CF* ![](/images/2021/08/picks/6640.png)](https://ethblock.art/view/6640)


**A LOT OF OTHER COOL THINGS! impossible to cover everything.**

[Next article on the future plots](/2021/08/plotting-pattern-03)

The ethblock.art BlockStyle 'Pattern 03' sold out yesterday in only 2 hours with 888 pieces. The day after Pattern 03, covering the rarity aspects.

The day after Pattern 03 (1/2)

- [Pre-release article](/2021/08/pattern-03)
- [Post article: Part 1: covering the rarity aspects](/2021/08/the-day-after-pattern-03)
- [Post article: Part 2: covering the future plots](/2021/08/plotting-pattern-03)

> 🤗 **The ethblock.art BlockStyle ['Pattern 03'](https://ethblock.art/style/32) sold out yesterday in only 2 hours with 888 pieces.** I still can't believe it. There are no words to describe how thankful I am for all your support. THANK YOU!

## What about the physical art?

Quick recap of the philosophy announced before the BlockStyle was released:

**Decoupling physical art from its digital form:** Not all digital NFT collectors also are physical collectors. It is therefore important to allow both to co-exist without having a limitation on any side.

**Openness and scalability of physical plotting**. The digital NFT have a "SVG" button on hover which allow to download the SVG file (right click, download). The SVG format is a vectorial format that is used to define all the "paths" of drawing. It is the recipe to plots. That way, this is truly scalable and decentralized. Like blockchain is. I am not necessarily the only one that can plot the work physically. It could be you. It could be another artist. This model allows it.

**An economy around the digital NFTs?** In this decoupled model, 'Pattern 03' digital NFT are the main pivot NFTs at stake. an economy can be built around them. Physical artists can plot them, create & sell on side collection that allows the second market to grow. There are many ways this can be traded: for instance swapping the digital NFT as a currency is a possibility that would be recommended, but so is doing a more regular "selling print as a service"... Ultimately, the physical artist value their own skills, own "touch" – a bit like a baker can sell baguettes with a shared recipe designed by ancestors.

## *"@greweb 'Pattern 03' plots"* collection

A collection [*"@greweb 'Pattern 03' plots"*](https://opensea.io/collection/greweb-pattern-03-plots) has been created on OpenSea.
It will curate plots that I will start drawing in the coming days.

It's going to be a time-consuming process as a plot takes about 1 hour to perform (depending on settings and complexity of the lines). The physical art is designed to be plotted with fountain pens on A4 water-colour 300g paper and then cut into a 21 by 21 centimeters piece with a 5mm padding (so your art is a 20x20cm square). The planned inks to use are those described by the "Ink" trait (Diamine inks). The digital NFT has simulated a rendering that will be relatively well respected. There is going to be unpredictability when plotting it for real.

> Disclaimer: Beware I will likely not be able to plot them all. There are 888 items and it takes an average 1 hour to plot. However, I'll start plotting following a bit this curation decision process:
> - personal favorite picks
> - I will look at Opensea most starred NFTs
> - I will look at Opensea most sold NFTs
> - also if you really want the physical piece. e.g. if you ask me on Discord / Twitter. I can sure take request and add it in the wished list But I can't guarantee it as it would probably takes me 800 hours =)

## First phase: 🎉 claim a physical plot *before November 1st, 2021*

This first phase will ends on November 1st, 2021 for all physical NFTs. The presented offer will only be available during that time. The NFT physical I own after this time will still be owned by me and a second phase will be documented later.

**How will it work?**

You can claim a physical NFT (created on the collection shared above) **as long as you own the digital NFT**. 

To claim it, you make a small Offer on the NFT physical (pay what you want, e.g. 0.03 WETH – ideally >0.02 to cover the mint cost) so I can verify you are the NFT digital owner & proceed to the NFT transfer of that 'physical NFT'.

You will then get a code to obtain it physically.

**How shipping works?**
- The 'physical NFT', once acquires, will have unlockable content with instructions on how to contact me for proceeding to shipping.
- **IMPORTANT: Please use a PO Box or other postal service ( e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poste_restante ). I do not want to know your home address, thanks.**
- On my side, I will use a simple (possibly tracked) letter to ship the 20x20cm art internationally.

## second phase?

**This phase is not yet planned and may happen if people are interested to these plots.**

<img width="50%" src="/images/2021/08/artist-1.jpg" /><img width="50%" src="/images/2021/08/artist-2.jpg" />

The ethblock.art BlockStyle 'Pattern 03' sold out yesterday in only 2 hours with 888 pieces. Let's cover what's next with future plots.

The day after Pattern 03 (2/2)

See follow-up articles:

- [Post article: Part 1: covering the rarity aspects](/2021/08/the-day-after-pattern-03)
- [Post article: Part 2: covering the future plots](/2021/08/plotting-pattern-03)

🤗 **The ethblock.art BlockStyle ['Pattern 03'](https://ethblock.art/style/32) was released on August 28th, 2021 and sold out in only 2 hours with 888 pieces.**

Pattern 03 is a tribute to fountain pen plotting, generating strokes lines to yield unique patterns. It recreates the condition of ink on paper in a digital art form. The second market will be exciting as these are also physically plottable. A SVG file can be downloaded from each NFT that is the recipe for a physical artist to perform the art physically (20cm square), with their own tools.

This article goes through many features of the generator and includes plotting tricks, technical notes, and useful information for collectors. You will see images attached, both digital and physical prototypes, at the end the rendering is very similar!

<img width="50%" src="/images/2021/08/pattern-03-post.jpg" /><img width="50%" src="/images/blockstyles/pattern-03/01.png" />

For many months, I've been exploring plotting art with fountain pens while exploring many different creative coding techniques. Every day, I've been releasing generators and plotting art that you can find on https://greweb.me/plots. This has been very interesting both technically and artistically. I expanded more and more my algorithm knowledge and creative coding techniques. These various experiences now contribute to this next level: I've made a "super generator" that generalizes many of them into one bundled *ethblock.art* BlockStyle generator.

Pattern 03 took a lot of patience and iterations to achieve its final result. I put my own expectation pretty high, I wanted great variety (and tweaking parameters is always hard). I also wanted a very realistic rendering technique that would almost look like the physical piece. The digital version had to be as good, if not better, than the possible physical piece that it could produce. I believe a lot in digital NFT by itself and the goal is to embrace digital-first.

In the past months, I've been thinking a lot about NFTs and the possibilities of physical VS digital art. I see many artists bridging the two worlds as well, there are many great experiments out there, I collected a bunch of physical art myself via NFTs. You already saw me already trying this ["plot loops"](/2021/05/plot-loops) concept.

**By minting on the generator, you are generating digital art.**

A lot of effort has been spent on the digital piece itself. It renders in a very realistic way on your browser, almost like if it was plotted, simulating many aspects of plotting. There is even a slight animation that I let you discover! The digital art is a unique 1:1 piece that will be an NFT that includes the SVG recipe:

 **By minting on the generator, you are curating one recipe for a possible plot.**

I've been plotting many prototypes to tweak parameters in a way that everything should technically be drawn with fountain pens! By minting, you are curating a plottable art that an artist from the plotting community could use. I've intentionally made it public and open for anyone to download the SVG related to a mint piece: ultimately anyone can plot it. This only unlocks the possibility and I will personally be one of this "physical artist" for the coming weeks. **(see *NFT and physical pieces?* section for more information)**

**By minting on the generator, you are a curator of the future plot collection.**

Giving the possibility for curators to select plotted art out of a generator with fine controls to tweak it is beyond anything I've seen done today in this field. In fine, minters have the responsibility to chose something really interesting that worth plotting, to express this responsibility, the fees to mint has been a bit higher than my previous BlockStyle.

 
 What I now want to achieve is to make the NFT as good "digitally" as it can be "physically". I've been plotting many prototypes to tweak parameters in a way that everything should technically be drawn with fountain pens! I want this art to be both physical and digital and in a loosely coupled way that gives full freedom of preferring one or the other or both.

 I intend later to offer a way for collectors to obtain the physical creation from me, but I believe this idea is beyond me and anyone in the plotting community could pick these to plot them. I believe a lot in free art, opensource and hacking mindset. I enjoy a lot free initiative like [plotterfiles.com](https://plotterfiles.com/) and this was a great inspiration here.

## What is EthBlock.art?

Before talking about 'Pattern 03', a quick recap of the platform I'm releasing on:

EthBlock.art aims to create a virtuous ecosystem of "deterministic art", code visualization of Ethereum blocks. Everything is data: from the ethereum block of transactions, to the code that visualizes it, and to the NFTs minted/traded using Ethereum transactions (that themselves are into Ethereum blocks).

This is a virtuous ecosystem, similar to [Supply Chain Transformation concepts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_chain): each actor in this ecosystem add value and get retributed for it, as I tried to explain in this schema:

![](/images/posts/cryptoaliens/ethblockart.png)

## The controls

As a minter, you get 6 "mods" controls.

- **MOD1:** allows you to pick your color. which recreates the conditions of some inks. Black is very powerful but also other inks are very vivid.

- **MOD2:** is controlling two factors, the border width (0.5 to 1.0) and the intensity of the noise (cycles twice).

- **MOD3:** is a general padding control and also tweaks border placement and sometimes lines distance.

- **MOD4:** control the alignment of waves and the amplitude of the "displacement" effect.

- **MOD5:** controls the resolution of each line. (beware high values slows down other mods)

- **MOD6:** adds a variable blur effect.

> MOD2 to MOD5 are controlling at least two properties of the art. This is something I like to call the "duality of controls". When you make one slider controlling two properties, you are giving a lot of variety while "constraining" the boundaries of the possible tweaks, forcing the minter to look for other blocks. This also is very important for the UX of the controls. There is always a tradeoff between being fully in control and having to search another block.

## Rarity features, block data and what drives the generation

In JavaScript is implemented the logic to extract out the "parameters" of the generator from the block data. While some of the work relies on the block hash and use an RNG (fun fact: there are 70 calls to `random()` to make it very diverse in results and rarity), some of the work also are big data analysis on the block data.

I'm going to document here how some of the main features work, You can do a general Ethereum blocks analysis to find the shape you prefer!

There are some other rarity features that I intentionally do not fully document. You do not need to "hunt" for the rarity that is "designed by the author", but instead search for the organic rarity & enjoy patterns and unexpected shapes.

> I crawled a lot of data from coingecko and etherscan to snapshot the prices of all ERC20 tokens in a way that I can value exactly how much a block have in $. I can then compare the Ethereum value and the ERC20 tokens value and do decisions based on it. (evaluated with Aug 2021 static prices)

### Main shapes

This most important feature split is the main shapes:

- If there is at least one transaction and mostly only Ethereum is transferred on that block (which is the case for very old blocks btw), you're going to get a **"rectangle spiral"**.
- If more $ is transferred in ETH than in ERC20 tokens, it's going to be **vertical lines**, **horizontal otherwise**.
- And finally, if there are actually exceptional amounts of ERC20 transfers (mostly only ERC20 transfers) it's going to Cross-Hatch.


### lines and "sub-lines"

**First: The plots are all composed of N main lines.**

The number of lines are driven by the number of transactions. More there are transactions in the minted art, more likely the number of lines will be high. This goes between 1 and 90 and these extremes are rare.

**Second: each line subdivide into M "sub-lines".**

It is most visible when there are not a lot of "lines" as it will diverge so much that sublines are no longer touching:

![](/images/2021/08/turquoise-crosshatch.jpg)

but it can also be subtle and not separate at all:

![](/images/2021/08/orange_lines.jpg)

### `f` main driver of curves

What I call `f` is a function that drives the sublines positioning and effectively makes them expanding or collapsing into one same line.

It is implemented using various noises and combined with different techniques. The following plot is covering most of them:

![](/images/2021/08/pink-osc.jpg)

- the general noise effect is the most common feature here and is available 99% of the time (not having this noise is rare). It is built with Simplex Noise and domain warping.
- the circling is an added feature that is not very common. It can have various properties.

There are also other cases like the fact lines would sometimes stop when the `f` values goes below 0.0.

### `displacement` second driver of curves

Displacement is a similar yet different technique. It allows displacing the whole lines independently of the `f` values. 

- The waving effect seen in the pink image above is produced with simple trigonometry.
- It can aggressively make lines moving a lot, even "looping" sometimes.

Displacement is overall a relatively rare feature. It is also one possible source of trouble for plotting (can dig the paper if you draw too much at the same place!) so it was pretty well contained.

Here is an example of displacement with aggressive settings:

![](/images/2021/08/aggressive-displacement.jpeg)

> It looks like a photo but this is actually the digital version!

### Inks and colors

The curator-artist chose one color among 11 inks. Each ink has various properties and some are very vivid. I would overall recommend black which produces very good contrast plots, but it's great to have the general possibility.

![](/images/2021/08/inks.jpg)

There are some plots that have color duality and that can also be plotted:

![](/images/2021/08/color-duality.jpg)

> This is a prototype and I was not careful as the corner and the final line scratch. Plotting is a challenge!

## Plot optimizations

A plotter is a machine that follows your drawing paths, here using SVG. When you do a SVG `<path>` every `move` (M) will be an actual move so you got to avoid useless moves. As it's easy to "move to the start" in algorithms, something that should not happen here.

Sometimes, the pen also was going up where I planned to "continue", this was the case of the initial algorithm of the "rectangle spiral", I avoided doing moves and preferred to connect lines.

To optimize the traveling of plotting lines, I've made it go back and forth: The first line is drawn from left to right, the second line gets drawn from right to left, and so on... This allows to avoid too much undesired ink accumulation or other pen/paper issues by alternating the direction.

Another problem I've optimized is the order of plotting lines and sublines. Instead of plotting all sublines in once, I preferred to plot the first subline of each line, then the second subline of each line, and so on... Despite the small extra move it requires, it's very important to balance the ink evenly as some inks tend to "dry" a bit over time which makes the drawing "fade away" as it flows. What's interesting is you can see the fading happening on each line:

![](/images/2021/08/strokes-zoom.jpg)

which is something I've simulated on the digital piece too! The effect varies from one ink to another.

> See also how the ink behaves on this photo? accumulation of this ink produces red-ish colors. Something that can be observed on the digital generator as well!

## Technical stack

Technically speaking, I believe this is the best achievement I did in a few years and profoundly refreshing. I managed to connect my creative coding pipeline: Rust generating SVG files, used through WASM and post-processed in WebGL to add extra effects and simulate the ink drawing. This was a blast to put these all together and I feel I've found something I'll keep doing in the next weeks and months.

The choice to use Rust was initially a personal exploration, using a language that is meant to be performant while being relatively high level and functional. It's something I did initially for plots and it helped on time-consuming algorithm. I've used it here for two reasons: first of all, most of my tooling for plotting is written in Rust, I'm very fluent it in now and I have many helpers I could reuse, secondly, there is a gain of performance. I have initially written my code in JavaScript and had some bad performance on the simple templating of the SVG code, I've estimated a gain of about x2 on the performance of using Rust. There are no super complex algorithms here, but it's still 2-3 loops with big iterations on them. The performance overall can still feel a bit slow, but you have to imagine each mod changes regenerate the SVG that can be up to 4 MB of XML.

I didn't try to enable asynchronicity or parallelism but it's something I will dig in the future when I'll do more complex work like shape packing (that can require parallelization).

This is a melting pot of technologies as I had to work on 3 aspects:
- In JavaScript is managed the logic that handles mods and block data and bakes the "parameters" of the generator.
- In Rust is implemented the generator itself, taking parameters in input and resulting SVG file.
- In WebGL/GLSL and gl-react library is implemented the simulation of ink on paper rendering.

## NFT and physical pieces?

The release of "Pattern 03" on EthBlock.art is primarily "digital" NFTs. Every BlockArt is going to be a digital NFT that includes the SVG recipe to make it physical.


**The physical collection is not meant to be 1 physical for 1 digital**. The idea is that the digital NFT remains unique but the physical art can be explored in different ways or ordered multiple times, it will not be guaranteed unique. Actually I can't prevent the plot to be done X times, like anyone can draw X times a La Joconde. However Nature have randomness and each physical plot will be unique.

**This is by design decoupled.**

- There are curators that prefer digital art, this is the BlockArt. There are curators that may be interest by the physical version.

- The "physical artist" do not necessarily need to be the same as the "digital artist". The idea here is the art goes beyond me, the digital pieces are recipes and a community of plotters could be using these digital pieces in different ways under different terms and with their own tools. This is the openness of blockchain and NFT and this is secured by the contracts and the ownership of NFTs.


**What I plan personally to do "as a physical artist"**. Now that this decoupling is explain, let me take the physical artist hat.
As physical plot have some cost, there are many ways to cover this. Indeed the simplest way is just to sell physical goods like a regular marchant.

As I said before *Nature have randomness and each physical plot will be unique.*. As a physical plot is still unique, I will emit an NFT each time I plot something.

In my case, there will be two ways of buying the physical piece:

- Either you will be able to SWAP your digital NFT against the physical NFT. And physical art will be shipped physically to where you want.
- Or you will be able to BUY it, but the price will be intentionally HIGHER than the digital NFT / will be following a bit the "floor price" of the digital NFTs of the collection.

I will also be the one to chose what I plot, I will not necessarily "plot them all" (but I can take requests) and I will not necessarily keep a 1:1 relationship as shared before. Actually, if you chose the SWAP option, I will have back the NFT digital, this is the way I get "paid" as I can then put it back on market.

I believe this ecosystem will be amazing and will allow a lot of options and freedom. I am so thrilled by the possibilities of NFT.

<img width="50%" src="/images/2021/08/artist-1.jpg" /><img width="50%" src="/images/2021/08/artist-2.jpg" />

Pattern 03 is a tribute to fountain pen plotting, generating strokes lines to yield unique patterns. It recreates the condition of ink on paper in a digital art form. The second market will be exciting as these are also physically plottable. A SVG file can be downloaded from each NFT that is the recipe for a physical artist to perform the art physically (20cm square), with their own tools.

Pattern 03, the first plottable generator on ethblock.art

<img width="400" src="/images/2021/05/relics.gif" />

# Releasing **Relics**, my first curated NFT collectible series, on Tezos blockchain and platform [_hicetnunc.xyz_](https://hic.link/greweb).

**Collection:** There are 28 curated visual loops that will be shared on the 7 days of this week. 4 NFT a day. I will use French day names as well as French seasons to name them all.

**Technical:** Relics collection are unique animation made with Perlin noise, cellular automaton and GLSL. The generator is fully open source and available on my website here: https://greweb.me/shaderday/63 as I strongly believe in open sourcing literally everything I do even as an artist. That said, I curated carefully the 28 unique NFTs myself and it's the only official collection of that generator.

> Contact me if you are the buyer to obtain the parameters of your NFT. Unfortunately it's not possible yet to "unlock" content as part of buying a NFT but I would be glad to give you the parameters of your NFT! I can also generate high resolution versions on demand (but also, the open sourced code allows it, once you have these parameters!).

_Lundi d'hiver, Lundi de printemps, Lundi d'été, Lundi d'automne._

<a href="https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/objkt/61391"><img src="https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/QmSbZ7iK1S2aDKtTM4HLkzjZrMCwgyDhNbqum8kQTfF44N" width="25%"/></a><a href="https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/objkt/61403"><img src="https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/QmbGrg2mckEbz5u6ShuQi5SbRcUKkEiY9S8irExUiJLizS" width="25%"/></a><a href="https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/objkt/61410"><img src="https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/QmZSQduPnXvmWvFo8JdC3WrxjzU9MbaKGD2JtywtWRq6C8" width="25%"/></a><a href="https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/objkt/61413"><img src="https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/Qmb2qS5Vp7YPfW5KqqgEm4aFqeTaGv2RXb81j1mG9dcLqL" width="25%"/></a>

_Mardi d'hiver, Mardi de printemps, Mardi d'été, Mardi d'automne._

<a href="https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/objkt/63131"><img src="https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/QmQHcBZ18wYDMq2B2i7AfQFC1e5CJytgsYxYzuanJ8Zxuy" width="25%"/></a><a href="https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/objkt/63126"><img src="https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/QmZRfP9fNKWRizNzHEiB4yHFPTSAuij53XJzXdeqz2qqNu" width="25%"/></a><a href="https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/objkt/62848"><img src="https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/QmT4xPg39PyVDEYGSi1BRce62jJnt2w8SmCDxEYJaZ47cQ" width="25%"/></a><a href="https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/objkt/62839"><img src="https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/QmXrWE4csSkPXYRg3BqhFmKVCzbXGDtNLRkku6Gc2PCY2Y" width="25%"/></a>

_Mercredi d'hiver, Mercredi de printemps, Mercredi d'été, Mercredi d'automne._

<a href="https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/objkt/64885"><img src="https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/QmcwpMrbg3n3iNo1TgQUS5LarKwFwz6kK9wexkc38ybRgT" width="25%"/></a><a href="https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/objkt/64874"><img src="https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/QmeDzVu5G1wLJxEsDXJXtdiJpMWAiRDfJnRgx16VmGH96X" width="25%"/></a><a href="https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/objkt/64863"><img src="https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/QmZuJcvNG2T7sCn959CWEuHZxi1C2Nr5H5JzbV6Sp5Pz3p" width="25%"/></a><a href="https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/objkt/64852"><img src="https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/Qmcomh1sD8L6wewENSWnqLT4akpRwrDpgABy8viu68b9Ua" width="25%"/></a>

_Jeudi d'hiver, Jeudi de printemps, Jeudi d'été, Jeudi d'automne._

<a href="https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/objkt/66703"><img src="https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/QmRe8RwPjLhatKbSMV5YGf3TDBKdB8W7xVnM8zQzNqe3dM" width="25%"/></a><a href="https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/objkt/66686"><img src="https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/QmNpPhofb4eJJq7YCDpjba8t3fNFQkY8W9ryM2iSreWkwB" width="25%"/></a><a href="https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/objkt/66683"><img src="https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/QmRN9L8PhKmfb4uM2LsFb2C2Gxa3YHZ7KQFZsSbSAUAMZ6" width="25%"/></a><a href="https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/objkt/66674"><img src="https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/QmXh2RAdgP841oJWdyMtBSQ78XnYQwHzEkTF8qze6hnbCn" width="25%"/></a>

_Vendredi d'hiver, Vendredi de printemps, Vendredi d'été, Vendredi d'automne._

<a href="https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/objkt/68578"><img src="https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/QmTXdtycdrp4v6UWymCeDJCamxHqUdHdy99XfK7vmVqqtx" width="25%"/></a><a href="https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/objkt/68575"><img src="https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/QmVyxcykCS8f1vpriReyedAfdP1M9wHq8pwyKtWtoUgXRb" width="25%"/></a><a href="https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/objkt/68572"><img src="https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/QmY1HcgrX7S5wxaYxRoFuxUWEdG6W6gAApDpzc1oYHSUDt" width="25%"/></a><a href="https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/objkt/68522"><img src="https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/QmSc8Q5ozk8nhLvzF6jry613WDhvFX6PjbqnKbyb97smhy" width="25%"/></a>

_Samedi d'hiver, Samedi de printemps, Samedi d'été, Samedi d'automne._

<a href="https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/objkt/69282"><img src="https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/QmasrfTskgzSj48gG62xFyWvXrJXWznyPakMB7GtYwgcY3" width="25%"/></a><a href="https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/objkt/69280"><img src="https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/QmdvFEWzkbK2yPNSNURPNNJTkGf55MoDfboXboCvYwVUob" width="25%"/></a><a href="https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/objkt/69276"><img src="https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/QmZhD4pwmRB43CN7hXKouGHMgCdwuFfnBweJfNBeSJeTBt" width="25%"/></a><a href="https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/objkt/69275"><img src="https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/QmdgVW9CnMY1P6o41EEaiwsJMDQdgxhPzo4xmrV8YLLJ66" width="25%"/></a>

_Dimanche d'hiver, Dimanche de printemps, Dimanche d'été, Dimanche d'automne._

<a href="https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/objkt/70994"><img src="https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/QmbTE4QGptyHGYsyemttEXSDoydapMuBiT94kooD3zLHc9" width="25%"/></a><a href="https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/objkt/70991"><img src="https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/QmXMUCZmptV4MyXJ8zUMM9ZoAfmWMLCTr5toPH99YLo6LY" width="25%"/></a><a href="https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/objkt/70973"><img src="https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/QmfVNN6bfzhsEK5fx45DwQTQ6hMrbASxgGzQnSgTwJEbJd" width="25%"/></a><a href="https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/objkt/70967"><img src="https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/QmU1VEYV7zyyN3LhES4mgAm8qdgjgvDERDRqu7GJnKtVQL" width="25%"/></a>

_published on [hic.link/greweb](https://hic.link/greweb)_

Relics collection are unique animation made with Perlin noise, cellular automaton and GLSL.

Relics NFT collection

I am thrilled to release my first **"plot loop"** and plan to release one every week. Let me explain simply the idea:

- an animation is generated with code, (SVG plottable files)
- Each frame of this animation is plotted physically,
- photographed back into a digital picture,
- and post-processed back into a video that makes it an artistic creation by itself as well as each physical plot being one "edition" of that plot loop series.

> **You can see all my plot loops made so far at [https://greweb.me/plots/tags/plotloop](https://greweb.me/plots/tags/plotloop)**

**So there are two creations:**

- the animation is itself digital art => it is released as an NFT, with as many editions as there are frames.
- each individual frame is physical art => it can be shipped to first buyer.

### Plots and NFT ?!

**Plot loop animations will be released as [Non Fungible Token (NFT)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-i9Jsm95ro)** on [hicetnunc](https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/). It allows anyone with Tezos crypto currency to acquire this video on Tezos blockchain. Digital collectors are collecting one edition of this NFT which adds to their collection: **The NFT video is an art in itself**. On top of this, physical collectors can also claim the shipping of the physical art of the frame corresponding to the collected NFT edition (there is as many editions as there are frames plotted).

**This is a hybrid concept between physical and digital art.** By buying a frame (by order of buy), the first buyer has the possibility to chose what happens to the physical art: either you allow me to keep it OR you can claim it (contact me on Twitter) and have me sending it anywhere in the world!

> I'm writing a bigger article about my recent NFT exploration and my art in general. I've been exploring so many ideas recently. I already sold some plots via NFTs, I am very honored to have found some buyers 😍. They can still be found at [hic.link/greweb](https://hic.link/greweb). I'm currently burning them one after the other to expire the possibility to buy them as I will focus on these new projects.

## First release, the triplanet loop

**hicetnunc NFT: [OBJKT#57902](https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/objkt/57902)**

<a href="/plots/121"><img width="50% " src="/images/plots/121.gif"/></a>

My first plot loop is called "Triplanet". It's a transition of two parametric functions with many perlin noise displacements. This is a continuation of ["Planet Holes"](/plots/100) series as well as recent ["Parametric stack"](/plots/111) explorations.
Every frame is generated with a Rust script I wrote.

**Triplanet was released in [plots#121](/plots/121).** 16 frames have been plotted with fountain pen on bristol paper (ink: Red Dragon by Diamine).

<img width="100%" src="/images/plots/121_walled.jpg"/>
<img width="50%" src="/images/plots/121_zoom.jpg"/><img width="50%" src="/images/plots/121_plot.jpg"/>

**Plotting with fountain pen is challenging** as it requires many search on the ink, paper and many fail and retry. Plotting all these frames took an afternoon.

## What's next?

I plan to release a _plot loop_ every week.

It's taking a lot of time to plot all frames so there are great challenges: first of all is to reduce the number of frames, secondly is to make them worth it, to make them really good: I want every frame to be unique, to include some specific elements, easter eggs, that make it recognizable out of the other frames.

---

# Please also check out other great artists

I believe a lot of this hybrid idea of mixing plot, animation, and NFTs. It was very funny for me to see all coïncidence and convergence of ideas on this topic. It's one of these moments when we have the same ideas at the same time. I'm not the only one exploring this and I want to do a big kudos to these great artists.

### Marion [@atelier_marion](https://twitter.com/atelier_marion/status/1388071908575490048)

who recently released a very similar idea! <del>She has 2 more frames yet to be taken!</del> Not anymore!

<a href="https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/objkt/42546"><img src="https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/QmXcAWQTaGHQp4BGy1krER284PoaPCNhKYzDrxp86MaM7b" style="max-width: 300px"></a>

She is also creating impressive drawing work as seen on her website: https://www.marionguy.com/shop

### Maks Surguy [@msurguy](https://twitter.com/msurguy)

who is behind [plotterfiles.com](https://plotterfiles.com/) platform. He also does a lot of great plotting art and thought about similar concept recently! [Checkout this article about his work.](https://medium.com/poptwig/artist-in-focus-maks-surguy-26277c95b197)

### Thomas Lin Pedersen [@thomasp85](https://twitter.com/thomasp85)

who is doing a [stuning work](https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/tz/tz2Pkj2xWJovKKCsABjnr3NbyMVJTMBkpTvb) and very impressive landscapes. Also selling NFT for shipping physical print.

He recently did a very cool NFT in collaboration with **Lionel Radisson** [@MAKIO135](https://twitter.com/MAKIO135):

<a href="https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/objkt/53662"><video style="max-width: 300px" controls autoplay loop src="https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmaGfhSgWX1UTq6jPX11mfHDxccK5eXGYqi6u71zNLaBhY"/></a>

### ...so many other artists!

Let's chat! You can join us on [hicetnunc's discord](https://discord.gg/jKNy6PynPK) on channel #phygital-objkts which explore very similar idea and where other artists will be active!

I'm also available for collaboration.

Releasing my first 'plot loop', generative animation plotted and published as an NFT.

'Plot loops' concept

[main]: /2021/04/cryptoaliens

> See also [CryptoAliens: Genesis][main] main article.

This article explains how [CryptoAliens: Genesis (ethblock.art)][main] works in technical depth.

<img src="/images/posts/cryptoaliens/032_px.png" width="50%" /><img src="/images/posts/cryptoaliens/036_px.png" width="50%" />

First of all, I would like to point out the [source code is available here on Github](https://github.com/gre/gre/tree/master/blockarts/CryptoAliens).

This whole idea was kicked off on [Twitch](https://twitch.tv/greweb). A recording is [available on Youtube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUzOlLq0IAo). Apart from the many glitches this 3 hours session had remained to be solved, the main part of this was implemented that night. Indeed I had to work countlessly on polishing the shaders, lighting and post-processing. I also spent a lot of time using the block data in a meaningful way because it's what [EthBlock.art](https://ethblock.art) really is about.

## EthBlock.art revolutionary idea

Before going further into the technical details of CryptoAliens, I would like to point out how revolutionary this EthBlock.art idea is.

The project aims to create a virtuous ecosystem of "deterministic art", code visualization of Ethereum blocks. Everything is data: from the ethereum block of transactions, to the code that visualize it, and to the NFTs minted/traded using Ethereum transactions (that themselves are into Ethereum blocks).

**This is a virtuous ecosystem, similar to [Supply Chain Transformation concepts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_chain): each actor in this ecosystem add value and get retributed for it, as I tried to explain in this schema:**

![](/images/posts/cryptoaliens/ethblockart.png)

`CryptoAliens: Genesis` is one possible BlockStyle that I've designed, as a creative coder. It tries to visualize what happened in the Ethereum Block and will take mods into account to try to be as good as possible to deliver interesting possibilities to BlockArt minters.

## Ok, so how is it implemented technically?

Indeed WebGL.

More precisely, it is implemented with [`gl-react`](https://github.com/gre/gl-react) which is convenient to write and compose [_GLSL Fragment Shaders_](https://www.khronos.org/opengl/wiki/Fragment_Shader).

**here is the big picture of the pipeline:**

![](/images/posts/cryptoaliens/graph.gif)

There are 2 main shaders: Mandelglitch (for skin texturing) and Scene (the main raymarching shader). Each of them take a bunch of parameters. `mod1..4` are values from the creator. The rest are inferred from the Block information, they are split into multiple parameters for convenience.

The parameters `s1..9` are coming directly from `mersenne-twister` library, a [PRNG](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudorandom_number_generator) used to get a wide and deterministic variety of shapes, initialized with the block hash. That said, as pointed in the previous section, the main features of the shape are determined by Ethereum block information itself (number of transactions, timestamp, transfers, gas used,...).

On top of these, some other parameters are controling key elements they come from more block information (heavy, head, bonesK, arms info,...).

The technique implemented on the main Scene shader is [raymarching distance functions](https://www.iquilezles.org/www/articles/raymarchingdf/raymarchingdf.htm). The shapes at stake are mostly segments that are merged with a smooth union. There are many loops involved which made it challenging to optimize.
There may be issues on some mobile phone even tho it works on mine thanks to a "pixelated" version. (downscaling the pixels helped)

Because of an heavy usage of this technique, the main scene was really challenging to optimize, it actually runs something like 5 FPS. My choice was to not animate it directly (you can see on the rendering graph that actually the buffer don't need to refresh, except when a "mod" is changed). However, thanks to intermediary framebuffers we can do 60 FPS animation at the postprocessing level. This is what the final user will get as the mods are static.

### Canvas 2D to draw texts

A Canvas 2D element is used to draw the text that will appear on top of everything.

```js
/// canvas used to draw in postprocessing ///
function FrameText({ blockNumber, dateText, width, height, kg, bones }) {
 const onCanvasRef = (canvas) => {
 if (!canvas) return;
 const ctx = canvas.getContext("2d");
 const w = ctx.canvas.width;
 const h = ctx.canvas.height;
 const pad = Math.round(w * 0.01);
 const padX = Math.round(w * 0.02);
 const fontS = Math.floor(0.19 * w) / 10;
 const fontSize = `${fontS}px`;
 ctx.save();
 ctx.fillStyle = "#000";
 ctx.fillRect(0, 0, w, h);
 ctx.font = "bold " + fontSize + " monospace";
 ctx.textBaseline = "top";
 ctx.fillStyle = "#fff";
 ctx.fillText(`CryptoAliens specimen #${blockNumber}`, padX, pad);
 ctx.textBaseline = "bottom";
 ctx.textAlign = "right";
 ctx.font = fontSize + " monospace";
 ctx.fillText(
 `born ${dateText}, ${kg} kg, ${bones} bones`,
 w - padX,
 h - pad
 );
 ctx.restore();
 };
 return (
 <canvas
 ref={onCanvasRef}
 width={String(width * 2)}
 height={String(height * 2)}
 />
 );
}
const FrameTextCached = React.memo(FrameText);
```

### How is Mandelglitch used?

As said, [Mandelglitch BlockStyle](https://ethblock.art/create/17) is re-used in this CryptoAliens BlockStyle. This really is the power of gl-react: it makes such composability really easy to do, the same way you can compose React components.

You can see in the [Youtube recording](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUzOlLq0IAo) the way I have implemented it initially: it is just a simple import of Mandelglitch.js (literally the BlockStyle as-is) that I can just send as a uniform sampler2D.

```
<Node
 shader={sceneShaders.scene}
 uniforms={{
 t: <Mandelglitch block={block} mod1={mod1} mod2={mod2} mod3={mod3} />,
 ...
```

after that, it was simpler to embed Mandelglitch in the BlockStyle.

The way Mandelglitch texturing is used however is that I will only use the "red" component and remap it to CryptoAliens' own palette, in order to have a better control of the coloring.

### Code organisation

React and Gl-React allows to organize the code relatively easily. First of all each pass in the rendering scene is a component, then shaders are organized in the `Shaders.create` usage. I've tried to collocate them (still in same one big file to simplify the upload to EthBlock.art).

I find it pretty convenient to externalize piece of the logic into "hooks" function. Example:

```js
const CustomStyle = (props) => {
 // prettier-ignore
 const { block, attributesRef, mod1, mod2, mod3, mod4, highQuality, width, height } = props;
 // prettier-ignore
 const { kg, bones, theme, background, s1, s2, s3, s4, s5, s6, s7, s8, heavy, head, bonesK, armsLen, armsSpread, armsCenter, armsEndW, dateText, blockNumber } =
 useBlockDerivedData(block, mod1, mod2, mod3, mod4);

 useAttributesSync(attributesRef, kg, bones, theme);

 return (
 <LiveTV
 text={
 <FrameTextCached ... />
 }
 ...
 >
 <NearestCopy width={w} height={h}>
 <Scene
 t={<MandelglitchCached ... />}
 ...
 />
 </NearestCopy>
 </LiveTV>
 );
};
```

`useBlockDerivedData` internally uses `useMemo` in order to cache the computation of block data interpretation.

In order to make **only** one part of the tree to actively re-render, i've used a local `useTime` that would re-render only that part (the LiveTV final shader). It's implementation is trivial:

```js
function useTime() {
 const [time, setTime] = useState(0);
 useEffect(() => {
 let startT;
 let h;
 function loop(t) {
 h = requestAnimationFrame(loop);
 if (!startT) startT = t;
 setTime((t - startT) / 1000);
 }
 h = requestAnimationFrame(loop);
 return () => cancelAnimationFrame(h);
 }, []);
 return time;
}
```

## Arms joints rotation, GLSL random and determinism

Ok, this is a hard topic. But it's extremely important that every BlockArt reliably produce the same result with the same block data, regardless of the computer used.

That last "regardless of computer used" part has challenged me at the last minute! JavaScript doesn't have this problem because it's stable between implementations (computers, engines). However, **this is not the case with OpenGL / GLSL**: every computer, every hardware (GPU) or possibly the "backend" implementation for WebGL ([ANGLE](https://github.com/google/angle) have different backends) can differ when it comes to float precision and primitive results.

In my shader, I was using the classical `random` function that is documented at https://thebookofshaders.com/10/

```cpp
float random (vec2 st) {
 return fract(sin(dot(st.xy, vec2(12.9898,78.233))) * 43758.5453123);
}
```

It works very well when you need a nice 2D distributed noise for basic effects **but it is very bad if you strongly rely on a stable & consistent noise to generate different shapes**.

Empirically, I can observe that `sin()` yields different results on different computers.

This was impacting me badly because I was able to see very various shapes:

<img src="/images/posts/cryptoaliens/rand1.png" width="33%"/><img src="/images/posts/cryptoaliens/rand2.png" width="33%"/><img src="/images/posts/cryptoaliens/rand3.png" width="33%"/>

What I need to varies a bit here is just the angle at each joint of the arms. This is very important for the uniqueness of the creature. The problem is that if each value changes a tiny bit, the whole thing diverge VERY QUICKLY, as the rotation angle will accumulate.

Worse than that, I had a bad pattern to accumulate randomness like this:

```cpp
float ss1 = s1;
for (int i = 0; i < armsLen; i++) {
 ss1 = random(ss1);
 ...
}
```

Actually I don't need that, first of all it's probably not good for performance, secondly I can just afford taking the fractional part of a simple polynomial:

```cpp
float arm (inout vec3 p, float index, float w, float h) {
 float s = sdSegment(p, h, w);
 float base1 = 305.53 * s1 + 77.21 * index;
 float base2 = 403.53 * s2 + 69.71 * index;
 for (int i = 0; i < armsLen; i++) {
 float fi = float(i);
 float ss1 = fract(base1 + 9.412 * fi);
 float ss2 = fract(base2 + 8.823 * fi);
 pR(p.xy, 8. * s4 * (ss2-.5));
 pR(p.xz, 6. * s5 * (ss1-.5));
 s = fOpUnionSoft(bonesK, s, sdSegment(p, h, w));
 h *= .9;
 w *= .9;
 p.y -= 1.2 * h;
 }
 s = fOpUnionSoft(bonesK + 0.2 * s5, s, length(p) - armsEndW);
 return s;
}
```

Note that here it's very arbitrary numbers, the point is to obtain variety and unpredictability in the results. `fract` is a very simple operation (take the fractional part of the number). Indeed i'm still prone to approximation, but the risk is limited by the fact i don't go too high in values here. Worse case scenario is it varies a bit the rotation but it should be so tiny that it won't be visible.

As said before and as seen in this code, the number will be used to do rotations (that `pR` is transforming `p` with some rotations). I use `s4` and `s5` values to give the magnitude of rotations.

**Let's look at a few cases:**

If both s4 and s5 are very near 0.0, it will be straight arms (it's a rare case therefore).

<img src="/images/posts/cryptoaliens/042_px.png" width="50%"/><img src="/images/posts/cryptoaliens/033_px.png" width="50%"/>

If one of the s4 or s5 are 0.0, it will be only happening on one "plan", or slightly diverging spirals, which I assume also to be rare cases:

<img src="/images/posts/cryptoaliens/017_px.png" width="50%"/><img src="/images/posts/cryptoaliens/020_px.png" width="50%"/>

Otherwise, most of the times, it will be relatively random:

<img src="/images/posts/cryptoaliens/029_px.png" width="50%"/><img src="/images/posts/cryptoaliens/032_px.png" width="50%"/>
<img src="/images/posts/cryptoaliens/028_px.png" width="50%"/><img src="/images/posts/cryptoaliens/026_px.png" width="50%"/>

## going 128px. Last minute decision, hard tradeoff

Due to concerns on the "deterministic rendering" from Ethblock.art folks, I had to make a choice regarding the fact it was too slow on mobile... I've decided to switch to 128x128 rendering for ALL platforms so it's consistent.

All the images on that article were done on 1024x1024 which is slow on computer and not even working on my mobile phone. (OnePlus)

It's hard to have efficient raymarching today when you have many items.

**Ultimately, I like how it finally looks, there were some minimalism / cell shaded styles,.. now it embraces Pixel Art even more!**

<img src="/images/posts/cryptoaliens/r02.png" width="50%" /><img src="/images/posts/cryptoaliens/r01.png" width="50%" />

It's also always possible to make higher quality version of these rendering and I'm excited to experiment more of these in future.

---

My name is Gaëtan Renaudeau, and I'm a noise explorer. **feel free to ping me on Twitter [@greweb](https://twitter.com/greweb)**

Technical aspects of CryptoAliens digital creatures generated with Ethereum blockchain blocks. They can be minted on ethblock.at by anyone, which establishes a limited set of CryptoAliens species.

CryptoAliens: Genesis, a technical look

[create]: https://ethblock.art/create/24
[opensea]: https://opensea.io
[tech]: /2021/04/cryptoaliens-tech

> See also [CryptoAliens: Genesis, a technical look][tech].

<img src="/images/posts/cryptoaliens/021_px.png" width="50%" /><img src="/images/posts/cryptoaliens/001_px.png" width="50%" />

> CryptoAliens: Genesis establishes the first embryonic species. Which CryptoAliens are you going to chose? Each creature gets born on an Ethereum block that nourishes its shape: transactions, ETH value transferred, gas,... their unique skin comes from Mandelglitch's BlockStyle with the same rarity scheme.

## What are CryptoAliens?

CryptoAliens are digital creatures generated from Ethereum blockchain blocks. They can be minted on [ethblock.art][create] by anyone, to establishes a limited set of CryptoAliens species in a decentralized matter. Each block produced on Ethereum have unique elements that can be visualized in creative ways.

<img src="/images/posts/cryptoaliens/014_px.png" width="50%" /><img src="/images/posts/cryptoaliens/017_px.png" width="50%" />

> **CryptoAliens are born and nourished from transactions, transactions are bones, ETH is flesh,... and many other aspects that this article will explain!**

<img src="/images/posts/cryptoaliens/032_px.png" width="50%" /><img src="/images/posts/cryptoaliens/013_px.png" width="50%" />

### So I decide which ones are the CryptoAliens?

**Yes! As a NFT minter, you are the creator and you contribute at establishing the first 'Genesis' series of CryptoAliens.** You decide which creature deserve to live. You are the curator and it is your responsible to do a lot of research and find the most adorable (or the creepiest?) creature!

<img src="/images/posts/cryptoaliens/036_px.png" width="50%" /><img src="/images/posts/cryptoaliens/004_px.png" width="50%" />

### How many CryptoAliens are there?

Every single CryptoAliens species is unique and there are currently 12 millions because that's as many blocks there are today (April 2021). Every 15 seconds, a new block is minted on Ethereum blockchain (with usually hundreds of transactions in it) making a new CryptoAliens possibility.
The block is the DNA, but the creature only starts existing when minted!

**TLDR. CryptoAliens only comes to life when someone mint it as an NFT on the [ethblock.art][create] contract.** They can then be sold and traded on [opensea.io][opensea]. There is **a limited amount of CryptoAliens possible to mint** so be wise at your choice. In this 'Genesis' series, the current supply is set to 100!

<img src="/images/posts/cryptoaliens/002_px.png" width="50%" /><img src="/images/posts/cryptoaliens/003_px.png" width="50%" />

### What is 'Genesis' series about?

The idea of 'Genesis' is that we are collectively going to create the initial species of this universe (with the NFT we chose to mint).

Minting a _CryptoAliens: Genesis_ specimen is giving birth to the creature, therefore the current NFT is visualized on [ethblock.art][create] as a video tape recording of that time of birth (with the block number, time, weight and number of bones). These data are included in the NFT itself and could be reused in future!

## What determines how a CryptoAliens specimen looks like?

There are many information contains in Ethereum blocks that will get used to determine the general shape and gives its rarity.

### Block's timestamp

<img src="/images/posts/cryptoaliens/040_px.png" width="50%" /><img src="/images/posts/cryptoaliens/041_px.png" width="50%" />

When the block happened during UTC night, the visual will be in dark mode.

### Block's transactions amount

<img src="/images/posts/cryptoaliens/007_px.png" width="50%" /><img src="/images/posts/cryptoaliens/008_px.png" width="50%" />

When a block contains a lot of transactions it will impact its general weight. It will be highlighted by this very heavy blobs shapes. That said, the weight can be more or less dense based on amount of bones and also unique for each CryptoAliens specimen.

### Block's heavy transfers in ETH

<img src="/images/posts/cryptoaliens/035_px.png" width="50%" /><img src="/images/posts/cryptoaliens/020_px.png" width="50%" />

As said in the introduction, "ETH is flesh". Even tho most of the time it will impact the general weight of the creature, when a block contains an expectionally high transfer of Ethereum value, it will be highlighted by a big "head" on the creature. ("head" in doublequote because none of our scientist really figured what is this)

### Block's exceptionally low amount of ETH transferred

<img src="/images/posts/cryptoaliens/005_px.png" width="50%" /><img src="/images/posts/cryptoaliens/006_px.png" width="50%" />

On the contrary, when a block contains almost no ETH transfers, the arms will be very thin. Clearly ETH traders didn't nourish enough this poor creature.

### Block's important ratio of gas used (vs ETH value transfer)

<img src="/images/posts/cryptoaliens/023_px.png" width="50%" /><img src="/images/posts/cryptoaliens/016_px.png" width="50%" />

It often appears in combination with the previous criteria, if the ratio `total gas / total eth transfers` is high, meaning that a lot of the ETH is into gas, there will be some blobs at the end of the arms.

### ...and more block rare features

There are a lot of special cases are rare conditions that can happen. I will not disclose and I will let you discover. Some are really rare and some will be discovered in the future (even the author of blockstyle won't be aware of all cases!).

### Block's hash

Finally, the block hash gives variety in the results. It's necessary in order to have truly unique 12 millions species. But it's only complementary to the various other criteria. There are many features that are getting impacted by it, including the skin texturing (see _Mandelglitch BlockStyle_ section).

<img src="/images/posts/cryptoaliens/043_px.png" width="50%" /><img src="/images/posts/cryptoaliens/042_px.png" width="50%" />
<img src="/images/posts/cryptoaliens/012_px.png" width="50%" /><img src="/images/posts/cryptoaliens/038_px.png" width="50%" />

### What controls does the creator have?

At creation time, the minter also have the ability to move a bit the specimen:

- `mod1` is a simple rotation around it.
- `mod2` is a simple climbing and zooming.
- `mod3` will flex a bit the shape to make it torn & twist a bit.
- `mod4` have an impact on the color palette scaling.

**On top of this, mods have the ability to transform the skin texturing** which is actually based on [Mandelglitch BlockStyle](https://ethblock.art/create/17)! That means the rarity elements of Mandelglitch are shared in this new BlockStyle.

### mmh, Mandelglitch BlockStyle?

<a href="https://ethblock.art/create/17"><img src="/images/posts/cryptoaliens/mandelglitch.png" width="10%" /></a> **[Mandelglitch](https://ethblock.art/create/17) is a BlockStyle on [ethblock.art](https://ethblock.art/create/17), derived from Mandelbrot fractal.**

The visibility of Mandelglitch on the skin has been intentionally contained, but sometimes it is more visible. Here are two examples:

<img src="/images/posts/cryptoaliens/031_px.png" width="50%" /><img src="/images/posts/cryptoaliens/022_px.png" width="50%" />

## ...and, What's next?

Who knows what's next! As everything is available on the blockchain, what you mint is saved immutably and forever. Me or other artists could fork the code ([available on Github](https://github.com/gre/gre/tree/master/blockarts/CryptoAliens)) to make animated version of the CryptoAliens that were chosen (as this code is open source). Also we can imagine doing crossover between species or doing "evolution" of these species over time. Everything is possible!

---

See also [CryptoAliens: Genesis, a technical look][tech].

My name is Gaëtan Renaudeau, and I'm a noise explorer. **feel free to ping me on Twitter [@greweb](https://twitter.com/greweb)**

CryptoAliens are digital creatures generated from Ethereum blockchain blocks. They can be minted on ethblock.at by anyone, which establishes a limited set of CryptoAliens species. Each block produced on Ethereum have unique elements that can be visualized in creative ways.

CryptoAliens: Genesis [ethblock.art]

[cookbook]: https://gl-react-cookbook.surge.sh
[github]: https://github.com/gre/gl-react
[jest]: https://github.com/facebook/jest
[headless-gl]: https://github.com/stackgl/headless-gl
[bus]: https://gl-react-cookbook.surge.sh/api#bus

# Happy to release **[https://gl-react-cookbook.surge.sh][cookbook]** containing 43 unique examples and API documentation!

[![](/images/2016/12/gl-react-v3.gif)][cookbook]

> If you don't want to be "spoiled" by this article, go through [the cookbook examples][cookbook]. This article will explore some of them.



## gl-react has been rewritten from scratch

**gl-react v3 is a complete rewrite of the v2 implementation for better performance and compatibility with React paradigm.**

This is not yet published on NPM as it's [still in development][github] (the Web version is pretty ready, React Native version is not implemented).

Most features provided by gl-react v2 are preserved (API haven't changed, [see how similar is the HelloGL example](https://gl-react-cookbook.surge.sh/hellogl)), but v3 fixes most Github issues accumulated for a year.

### The biggest mistake of the previous implementation

If there is one lesson learned from previous gl-react implementation: **"unfolding" / consuming the `children` prop by yourself is (probably) wrong, let React solve this job!** Using React, you can benefit [React reconciliation and diff algorithm](https://facebook.github.io/react/docs/reconciliation.html).
In other words, always prefer to keep users' VDOM tree rather than consuming it with `React.Children.*` functions.

I feel dumb not having discovered this before, but if you are not actually rendering DOM it's an easy path for a library to just map, traverse, consume the children tree and just render what you needs (like just a `<canvas/>`). But this is probably a mistake! First, this makes it impossible to use React Devtools and see the original tree, but more importantly, it breaks interoperability with other libraries (e.g. don't forbid someone to use [react-motion](https://github.com/chenglou/react-motion) or [React Router](https://github.com/ReactTraining/react-router) in the middle of your components!).

A better idea is to preserve the user `children`. Keep your logic in each Component and use the React lifecycle to create and destroy things, and **use [React context](https://facebook.github.io/react/docs/context.html) to connect children to parent**.

> You should better keep user `children`, even if it means rendering it in an empty ``, _current workaround of `gl-react`, looking forward to hearing from you, idea inspired from the great [react-music](https://github.com/FormidableLabs/react-music)_

### What it means for gl-react

The gl-react v3 implementation truly uses React lifecycle: **a React Component update triggers a GL redraw**. That way, `shouldComponentUpdate` allows to do partial GL re-rendering. Each Node holds a [framebuffer object](https://www.opengl.org/wiki/Framebuffer_Object) (created on mount, destroyed on unmount) that only get redrawn when component updates and schedules a Surface reflow.

`<Node>` receives the `gl: WebGLRenderingContext` from the ancestor `<Surface>` thanks to [React context](https://facebook.github.io/react/docs/context.html). There is also a `glParent` context (a Surface or another Node) that is used to make GL components discoverable each other so we can build a dependency graph. This dependency graph allows to implement the correct `draw` pipeline (and it's pretty trivial, see [_Section "under the hood of Surface and Node redraw"_](#under_the_hook_redraw)).

## `<Bus>`, a better way to share computation

[gl-react used to automatically factorize the duplicates elements of the GL tree](http://greweb.me/2016/06/glreactconf/) but **it has been decided to remove this feature**: _This was actually a complex mechanism (a bit too "magic"), hard to implement and a premature optimization that can have slower performance._

The new gl-react embraces the React paradigm: The new way to express a Graph (and share computation) is **using a [`<Bus>`][bus]**...

### The `` `()=>ref` `` pattern

The problem we want to solve is to **express a graph with React**, which, at first glance, only allow to represent trees, not graphs!

The way we can solve this is by using refs and a "ref getter function":

1. **a Bus with a ref:** `<Bus ref="myBus">{content to inject}</Bus>`.
2. **pass a function that resolves the ref** to pipe Bus into another Node. e.g: `()=>this.refs.myBus`.

[blurmapdyn example ![](/images/2016/12/blurmapdyn.gif)](https://gl-react-cookbook.surge.sh/blurmapdyn)
a single ConicalGradient should be used for all blur pass:
![](/images/2016/12/blurmapdynschema.png)

There are a few other good examples of ref usages:

- [blurmapmouse](https://gl-react-cookbook.surge.sh/blurmapmouse)
- [blurimgtitle](https://gl-react-cookbook.surge.sh/blurimgtitle) (same example that was features in 2016 React conf!)
- [behindasteroids](https://gl-react-cookbook.surge.sh/behindasteroids), crazy port of a game I made for js13k.

> The `()=>ref` pattern works only if you call the function after component did update (refs are set at this time).

## The good ol' children function

There is another pattern for more specific needs: instead of composing by giving an element, you can also compose by giving a **Function that returns an element**. Why that? Because, it's a way to nicely give you the redraw function: `redraw => <Video onFrame={redraw} />`:

[Checkout video example ![](/images/2016/12/videoredraw.png)](https://gl-react-cookbook.surge.sh/video?menu=true)

> We really just want to redraw if there is a new video frame.

We have merged the 2 patterns into one: if you provide a function, it's just called with `redraw`, and the returned value is used as a texture. We have a few cases to detect what kind of texture it is (and also an [extensible mechanism](https://gl-react-cookbook.surge.sh/api#textureloaders) used by implementations to load platform specific objects).
[(checkout this if you want to see the code)](https://github.com/gre/gl-react/blob/a33e6aa685479d588646b20dd62e1e25a64a5a47/packages/gl-react/src/Node.js#L704-L783)

## Node backbuffering & Backbuffer symbol

A new feature allows to inject the previous Node state as a texture. This is called backbuffering. One simple usecase is to implement Motion Blur persistence (like the GIF on top of this article).

We can also accumulate a state, for instance, to implement Game of Life!

[Game of life glider example ![](/images/2016/12/gol.gif)](https://gl-react-cookbook.surge.sh/golglider)

And the whole idea of gl-react (and React) is about composition. For instance, doing a rotating effect of that Game of Life is basically just `<Rotate> <GameOfLife /> </Rotate>`.

An interesting part is that you can update the GameOfLife at a rate that is independent from the **Rotate** rendering: just by making GameOfLife a pure component that receives a tick, or implementing shouldComponentUpdate update (you have as many choices as React have to [shortcut the rendering](https://facebook.github.io/react/docs/react-api.html#react.purecomponent)).

[golrotscu example![](/images/2016/12/golrot.gif)](https://gl-react-cookbook.surge.sh/golrotscu)

> See the counters that indicate the number of redraw. (the capture preview in the Box only get snapshot each 100ms, but in the real canvas, it runs at 60 FPS)

Finally, please checkout [ibex example](https://gl-react-cookbook.surge.sh/ibex) (extracted from another JS13K game! xD).

> You can't leave this article before seeing [ibex example](https://gl-react-cookbook.surge.sh/ibex)! I'm serious, this is probably the most accomplished code I ever wrote! xD

## <a name="under_the_hook_redraw"></a> under the hood of Surface and Node redraw

In order to make redraw efficient, `gl-react` have 2 phases: the `redraw()` phase and the `flush()` phase (reflecting the respective methods available both on `Surface` and `Node`). This is a bit like a rendering engine:

- **`redraw()` phase** sets a dirty flag to a Node and all its "dependents" (other nodes, buses, surface). _redraws happen generally bottom-up to the Surface._
- **`flush()` phase** draws all nodes that have the redraw flag. _draws happens top-down from the Surface._

`redraw()` is directly hooked to React update lifecycle (re-rendering a Node will calls `redraw()` for you).
To make this system efficient, **the flush() is by default asynchronous**, i.e. `redraw()` means scheduling a new gl draw.
Surface have a main loop that runs at 60 fps and call `flush()`. This is very efficient because if Surface does not have the redraw flag, `flush()` does nothing.

> In gl-react inspector, clicking on the redraw count will call `redraw()` on the node / bus. We can illustrate that only "dependents" get redrawn using the advanced [blurimgtitle example](https://gl-react-cookbook.surge.sh/blurimgtitle):

[only "dependents" get redrawn ![](/images/2016/12/blurimgtitle-redraw.gif)](https://gl-react-cookbook.surge.sh/blurimgtitle)

This redraw/flush phases allow to prevent and skip rendering multiple times a Node. In some cases, we still want to redraw synchronously: with `<Node/>` `sync` prop. For instance, in Game of Life, we don't want to skip an update (the initial update set the initial GoL state, if it was async it might get skipped).

## Bonus

### Flow types

Flow types has been used for more robust code and better user experience. BTW, [WebGLRenderingContext will soon be released in flow](https://github.com/facebook/flow/pull/2764).

### Atom highlighting

If you are using Atom Editor, you can have JS inlined GLSL syntax highlighted.

![](https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/211411/20623048/0527cce2-b306-11e6-85ee-5020be994c10.png)

_To configure this:_

- add `language-babel` package.
- Configure `language-babel` to add `GLSL:source.glsl` in settings "_JavaScript Tagged Template Literal Grammar Extensions_".
- (Bonus) Add this CSS to your _Atom > Stylesheet_:

```css
/* language-babel blocks */
atom-text-editor::shadow .line .ttl-grammar {
 /* NB: designed for dark theme. can be customized */
 background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.3);
}
atom-text-editor::shadow .line .ttl-grammar:first-child:last-child {
 display: block; /* force background to take full width only if ttl-grammar is alone in the line. */
}
```

### Tests: almost 100% coverage!

The library is tested directly on the command line, thanks to [Jest][jest] and [headless-gl][headless-gl] _(Big up to [mikolalysenko](https://github.com/mikolalysenko) for [headless-gl][headless-gl]!)_.
**gl-react have 2000 line of tests, involving a lot of gl calls, and readPixels, and it runs... in a few seconds!** _(to Jest devs: you are wizards!)_

```

 PASS ./all.test.js
 ✓ renders a red shader (75ms)
 ✓ renders HelloGL (15ms)
 ✓ ndarray texture (27ms)
 ✓ renders a color uniform (18ms)
 ✓ composes color uniform with LinearCopy (21ms)
 ✓ no needs to flush if use of sync (24ms)
 ✓ Node can have a different size and be scaled up (18ms)
 ✓ Surface can be resized (32ms)
 ✓ bus uniform code style (17ms)
 ✓ bus example 1 (17ms)
 ✓ bus example 2 (18ms)
 ✓ bus example 3 (17ms)
 ✓ bus example 4 (22ms)
 ✓ bus example 5 (14ms)
 ✓ bus example 6 (24ms)
 ✓ bus: same texture used in multiple sampler2D is fine (14ms)
 ✓ a surface can be captured and resized (16ms)
 ✓ a node can be captured and resized (17ms)
 ✓ Uniform children redraw=>el function (22ms)
 ✓ Bus redraw=>el function (16ms)
 ✓ many Surface updates don't result of many redraws (18ms)
 ✓ many Surface flush() don't result of extra redraws (10ms)
 ✓ GL Components that implement shouldComponentUpdate shortcut Surface redraws (27ms)
 ✓ nested GL Component update will re-draw the Surface (24ms)
 ✓ Node `clear` and discard; (24ms)
 ✓ Node `backbuffering` (32ms)
 ✓ Node `backbuffering` in `sync` (36ms)
 ✓ texture can be null (12ms)
 ✓ array of textures (22ms)
 ✓ Node uniformsOptions texture interpolation (17ms)
 ✓ can be extended with addTextureLoaderClass (70ms)
 ✓ Surface `preload` prevent to draw anything (59ms)
 ✓ Surface `preload` that fails will trigger onLoadError (59ms)
 ✓ renders a shader inline in the Node (15ms)
 ✓ testing connectSize() feature (17ms)
 ✓ handle context lost nicely (43ms)
 ✓ Bus#uniform and Bus#index (25ms)
 ✓ VisitorLogger + bunch of funky extreme tests (140ms)

-------------------------------|----------|----------|----------|----------|----------------|
File | % Stmts | % Branch | % Funcs | % Lines |Uncovered Lines |
-------------------------------|----------|----------|----------|----------|----------------|
All files | 97.85 | 88.8 | 95.96 | 99.35 | |
 src | 97.82 | 88.95 | 95.9 | 99.35 | |
 Backbuffer.js | 100 | 100 | 100 | 100 | |
 Bus.js | 96.15 | 74.29 | 100 | 100 | |
 GLSL.js | 100 | 50 | 100 | 100 | |
 LinearCopy.js | 100 | 100 | 100 | 100 | |
 NearestCopy.js | 100 | 100 | 100 | 100 | |
 Node.js | 97.65 | 92.71 | 97.01 | 99.01 | 214,216,358 |
 Shaders.js | 100 | 76.92 | 100 | 100 | |
 Texture2DLoader.js | 100 | 100 | 100 | 100 | |
 TextureLoader.js | 100 | 100 | 100 | 100 | |
 TextureLoaderNDArray.js | 100 | 100 | 100 | 100 | |
 TextureLoaders.js | 100 | 100 | 100 | 100 | |
 Visitor.js | 100 | 100 | 75 | 100 | |
 VisitorLogger.js | 100 | 92.59 | 100 | 100 | |
 Visitors.js | 100 | 100 | 100 | 100 | |
 connectSize.js | 100 | 85.71 | 100 | 100 | |
 copyShader.js | 100 | 100 | 100 | 100 | |
 createSurface.js | 97.09 | 83.61 | 94.55 | 99.32 | 361 |
 genId.js | 100 | 100 | 100 | 100 | |
 index.js | 100 | 100 | 100 | 100 | |
 src/helpers | 100 | 75 | 100 | 100 | |
 disposable.js | 100 | 50 | 100 | 100 | |
 invariantNoDependentsLoop.js | 100 | 100 | 100 | 100 | |
-------------------------------|----------|----------|----------|----------|----------------|
Test Suites: 1 passed, 1 total
Tests: 38 passed, 38 total
Snapshots: 4 passed, 4 total
Time: 2.655s
Ran all test suites.
```

One limitation is that all tests need to be in a single file. [I created an issue here](https://github.com/facebook/jest/issues/2029). I think it's either an issue in [Jest][jest] or in [headless-gl][headless-gl].

## Tradeoffs and remaining work

The library tradeoffs are written in [TRADEOFFS.md](https://github.com/gre/gl-react/blob/master/TRADEOFFS.md). We might cover some unexplored direction in a near future and solve some of them.

v3 is still in development, the main unfinished part is the React Native implementation which is now the main priority of the library.
It will probably rely on an awesome initiative: a React Native WebGL implementation started in Exponent by [@nikki](https://github.com/nikki93)!

For more information, see [v3 alpha: development in progress](https://github.com/gre/gl-react#v3-alpha-development-in-progress).

gl-react has been reimplemented from scratch, feedback from previous mistake and overview of new features.

gl-react v3

[Relay]: https://github.com/facebook/relay
[Relay-spec]: https://facebook.github.io/relay/docs/graphql-relay-specification.html#content


[Relay][Relay] doesn't solve for you how you should render your components. Relay is "universal" and doesn't even assume it will be running in a browser context. It focuses only on providing an abstraction to work with GraphQL – the same way React focuses only on rendering. Each library solves one single problem at a time *(and hell, both are complex enough problem to solve already)*.

Because these libraries are very generic, it's now up to the community to solve the "more specific" parts. Just search on NPM and you can find tons of React libraries already, some might help you to solve part of the problem you want to solve.

This article demonstrates one use-case: **implementing a component handling the scroll of a list to pull more data** of a GraphQL connection with Relay.



## Usage

In React you should think in term of components that subdivide individual task to solve. To solve scrolling a connection you should just need this:

```js
<InfiniteScrollable relay={relay}>
 ...
</InfiniteScrollable>
```

Here is a real use-case we have at [projectseptember](https://projectseptember.com).


```js
import React, {
 Component,
 PropTypes,
} from "react";
import Relay from "react-relay";
import List from "material-ui/List";
import Content from "./Content";

class ContentStream extends Component {
 static propTypes = {
 relay: PropTypes.object.isRequired,
 user: PropTypes.object,
 };
 render () {
 const { user, relay } = this.props;
 return (
 <InfiniteScrollable relay={relay}>
 <List>
 {user.stream.edges.map(e =>
 <Content content={e.node} key={e.cursor} />
 )}
 </List>
 </InfiniteScrollable>
 );
 }
}

export default Relay.createContainer(ContentStream, {
 initialVariables: {
 first: 50,
 },
 fragments: {
 user: () => Relay.QL`
fragment on User {
 stream (first:$first) {
 edges {
 cursor
 node {
 ${Content.getFragment("content")}
 }
 }
 }
}
 `
 }
});
```

We don't have to express how to "pull for more data" in that code. In fact, this is delegated to `InfiniteScrollable` and we never have to think again about it.


## InfiniteScrollable implementation

Relay enforces to implement [a subset of GraphQL spec](https://facebook.github.io/relay/docs/graphql-relay-specification.html#content), like the Connection API. It's a good thing because we can also rely on this fact, and what we only need is the `relay` object to implement a generic pull-on-scroll.


```js
import {
 Component,
 PropTypes,
} from "react";
import {findDOMNode} from "react-dom";

const regex = /(auto|scroll)/;

const style = (node, prop) =>
 getComputedStyle(node, null).getPropertyValue(prop);

const scroll = (node) =>
 regex.test(
 style(node, "overflow") +
 style(node, "overflow-y") +
 style(node, "overflow-x"));

const scrollparent = (node) =>
 !node || node===document.body
 ? document.body
 : scroll(node)
 ? node
 : scrollparent(node.parentNode);

const resizeEventOn = n => n===document.body ? window : n;

export default class InfiniteScrollable extends Component {
 static propTypes = {
 children: PropTypes.any.isRequired,
 relay: PropTypes.object,
 style: PropTypes.object,
 loadPixelsInAdvance: PropTypes.number,
 relayVariable: PropTypes.string,
 chunkSize: PropTypes.number,
 // loadMore could even be generalize, this component works if you provide loadMore instead of relay
 loadMore: PropTypes.func, // (can) returns a promise
 };
 static defaultProps = {
 loadPixelsInAdvance: 1000,
 relayVariable: "first",
 chunkSize: 50,
 };

 state = { loading: false };

 resizeBoundOnDom = null;

 componentDidMount () {
 this.syncScrollBodyListener(this.props);
 this.checkScroll();
 }

 componentWillUnmount () {
 this.unbindResizeEvent();
 }

 componentDidUpdate () {
 this.syncScrollBodyListener();
 }

 unbindResizeEvent () {
 if (this.resizeBoundOnDom) {
 this.resizeBoundOnDom.removeEventListener("scroll", this.checkScroll);
 this.resizeBoundOnDom = null;
 }
 }

 getScrollParent () {
 return scrollparent(findDOMNode(this));
 }

 syncScrollBodyListener = () => {
 const resizeBoundOnDom = resizeEventOn(this.getScrollParent());
 if (resizeBoundOnDom !== this.resizeBoundOnDom) {
 this.unbindResizeEvent();
 resizeBoundOnDom.addEventListener("scroll", this.checkScroll);
 }
 };

 loadMoreUsingRelay = () => {
 const { relay, relayVariable, chunkSize } = this.props;
 return new Promise((resolve, reject) =>
 relay.setVariables({
 [relayVariable]: relay.variables[relayVariable] + chunkSize
 }, readyState => {
 if (readyState.error) reject(readyState.error);
 if (readyState.done) resolve();
 }));
 };

 checkScroll = () => {
 if (this.state.loading) return;
 const container = this.getScrollParent();
 if (!container) return;
 const { height } = container.getBoundingClientRect();
 const { scrollHeight, scrollTop } = container;
 const bottom = scrollTop + height;
 const { loadPixelsInAdvance } = this.props;
 const advance = bottom - scrollHeight + loadPixelsInAdvance;
 if (advance > 0) {
 this.setState({ loading: true }, () =>
 Promise.resolve({ advance, bottom, scrollHeight, height, scrollTop, loadPixelsInAdvance })
 .then(this.props.loadMore || this.loadMoreUsingRelay)
 .then(
 () => this.setState({ loading: false }), // technically could recall checkScroll here. in second callback of setState. fork it, try it, adapt it !
 e => (console.warn(e), this.setState({ loading: false }))
 ));
 }
 };

 render () {
 // you might want to render a spinner?
 // children might be a function?
 // etc..
 // these are some variations we could have from this starting point
 return this.props.children;
 }
}
```


This is a **possible implementation** of this problem. You might want to add more things based on your needs. For instance you could automatically render a loading spinner... or a million other things! Please try it, fork it, give feedback :)

It is also possible to implement it as a High Order Component (HOC): [https://github.com/facebook/relay/issues/1377](https://github.com/facebook/relay/issues/1377).

implement a component handling the scroll of a list to pull more data of a Graphql Connection with Relay