Web app for generating geometric line art for pen plotters like the AxiDraw. Pick from 49 generative art designs, adjust them in the browser and export plot-ready SVG files. Built using JavaScript, HTML and CSS with no dependencies.
Visit the Plotter Geometry web app to access the latest deployment. It also works offline after the first visit.
Currently supports 49 designs:
- Curves: spirograph, mystery curves, harmonograph, Maurer rose, superformula, guilloché, times table, flower, phyllotaxis, strange attractors (Lorenz, Aizawa, Thomas and more) and ribbon sculptures of knots and linked bands
- Fields: flow fields, ridgelines, topographic contour maps, wireframe terrain meshes with hidden lines removed, an island drowning as the sea rises, Chladni patterns, electric and magnetic field lines, a black hole with its disk bent over the top by gravity, moiré and op-art warp
- Tiles: Truchet tiles, Gothic window tracery and rose windows, Islamic star patterns, Penrose tiling, hyperbolic tiling, Celtic knots, whirls, mazes and L-system fractals
- Packing: circle packing, Apollonian gaskets, recursive subdivision and Voronoi
- Scenes: an isometric town of houses, apartments, A-frames, windmills, cars and trees, a harbor town with boats and a lighthouse, a walled castle town in its moat, a moon or Mars base with domes, greenhouses and rovers, a fairground of rides and tents, a railway yard with a roundhouse and steam engines, an alpine valley cut out like a topographic model, a cyberpunk skyline, a stadium that can be an old football ground, a bowl, a running track, a ballpark or a bullring, and a farm on the prairie, in hedgerow country, in the Tuscan hills or on a polder, all with hidden lines removed
- Studies: a megastructure tower packed with slab stacks, fins and grilles, a spiral stairwell in one-point perspective, comic pages of little alien landscapes and a plate of radiolarian skeletons with the inner shells showing through the pores
- Image: converts photos into line art in 12 styles, including squiggle spirals, waves, halftone, stipples, TSP art and string art
Select a design from the menu and use the sliders to adjust it. Click Randomize to generate new settings, or lock individual parameters to keep them from changing. Using the same seed and settings produces the same drawing.
Set the paper size (A6 to A2, Letter, Legal, Tabloid or custom), margins and pen widths to match your plotter setup. Designs can be scaled, rotated or arranged in a grid. Every design supports one to eight pens, with color defaults based on its geometry. Change the pen count in the design controls and edit the colors under Paper & Output. The pen list shows which parts of a scene each pen draws, like roofs, shadows or trees. Select a part there to move it to another pen. If you plot with markers, turn on Skip lines already drawn under Optimize so a pen doesn't go back over its own ink and dry out.
Click Export SVG to download the drawing. Exported SVGs use millimeter units and a separate Inkscape layer for each pen, so they work with the AxiDraw Inkscape extension, vpype and saxi. The export menu also includes vector PDF for printing, DXF for CAD and engraving, EPS for graphics software, PNG, one SVG file per pen, and a share link. Print PDF at actual size. Import DXF in millimeters. EPS crops to the artwork. See the export notes for format details and checks. Drop an exported SVG back onto the preview to restore its settings.
Press ? to view the keyboard shortcuts.
Clone the repository and open web/geometric-web-app/src/index.html in a browser.
To run with a local server, install Node.js and run:
git clone https://github.com/jarvisar/geometric.git
cd geometric/web/geometric-web-app
npm install
npm startSee GENERATORS.md for instructions on adding designs.
If you get some use out of it, you can buy me a coffee or support it on Patreon.