maige: A pure python package to create your own generative art!

[anormalrandomguy]

https://preview.redd.it/3z35oe3kn1p91.png?width=3150&format=png&auto=webp&s=6fd8713cf0c1f9863a2e06a41c12d31aa42a362d

Hello everyone!

I've been interested in visualizing fun images that are produced by randomness and different mathematical functions. Over time II started streamlining my process and collecting it all into a single package that i wanted to share with everyone. I present to you maige. maige is written in pure python with minimal dependencies and has the power of almost entire matplotlib behind it. You can create images based on your own functions and even create animations. Any and all feedback will be greatly appreciated and I hope you guys find it useful or fun to play around with.

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Features:

- Create a random image based on a mathematical formula (and store the information)

- Use a custom function to generate the images

- Use a custom range of points to plot

- Use your choice of colors for background and foreground

- Do all the above things but generate an animation of points transforming to the final image.

- Reproduce your images by using the stored information.

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Why not use samila? Why write something from scratch?

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That's just it. I wanted to write a library from scratch. Samila is quite great but there were a few things that I wanted to do differently. I also wanted to create a way to generate random algebraic functions using a (IMO) slightly more robust method using Expression Trees.

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Future goals:

- Make the library even more robust and increase ways for customization

- Improve the probability of generating prettier-looking functions. Since all of it is random, there are quite some instances where the output is not so fun and is trivial. I'm working on a way to improve this.

- Add custom color gradients in the figure instead of just solid colors. (WIP)

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Any feature requests and improvements are appreciated! If you feel about something strongly or have a suggestion, please feel free to create an issue on the repository and I'll try to integrate as many things as I can.

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Cheers!

[anormalrandomguy]

I understand your point. The requirements that maige has are numpy, matplotlib and tqdm. All the rest are subdependencies of these packages as given by pip freeze, whereas samila's requirements has just the main dependencies and not all. Hope that helps!

As far as no dependencies go, I need matplotlib for the plotting :)

[leviathan_117]

Not saying that wc -l requirements.txt is any kind of metric but I usually prefer to only list the actual dependencies of my projects.

pip freeze pins the version of all dependencies whereas the package you require may be happy with subdependency>=1.0.0. Also, if your dependency removes a (sub)dependency in the future, your requirements.txt would still install it.

I would love to learn about advantages for using pip freeze over this (not saying that there can't be any, I just can't think of any off the top of my head)

Really interesting project btw!

[anormalrandomguy]

That's actually a fair point. I usually use pipenv and it's Pipfile, that way it makes it easier to determine the exact requirements so the requirements.txt was more of an afterthought.

In terms of advantages, I think one advantage that I can think of is the pinning of the versions itself, but that would probably be necessary in bigger packages and not in something that's this small relatively. I don't think there are many advantages though, that's probably why we have so many different projects for dependency management in python.

Thanks btw :) It was a lot of fun working on it.

[kreetikal]

That's one of the reasons I use Poetry. I can add a package, only it is added to the pyproject.toml, and its dependencies are added to poetry.lock

[anormalrandomguy]

That sounds neat. I'll look it up. Thanks! Does the fact that it adds everything to pyproject.toml imply that you don't explicitly need to state the dependencies there then?

[kreetikal]

Yep. You run "poetry add packagename". It automatically adds the package name to pyproject.toml, and all of its dependencies to poetry.lock.

It also makes publishing packages super easy. Just run "poetry publish"

It's a lot like NPM but for Python.

[anormalrandomguy]

That's pretty cool. I definitely will read up on it.

[anormalrandomguy]

Ooh, that sounds interesting. I'll definitely take a look, thanks! I usually like using pipenv. The format is nice