FORM

• What Is Form
• Requirements
• FORM's home
• Artists who have used FORM
• The Tutorial
• Evolutionary Art, What is it?
• Other Programs for Evolutionary Art

What Is It?

Although this sounds none too inspiring the FORMs you can create with simple input files can be quite good.

You can also mutate these FORMs and "evolve" (or morph) between two related forms.

This program is not a CAD package, none of the forms produced are intended to represent anything real in any way, they are just supposed to look good.

For those of you who have seen or read TODD and LATHAM's book "Evolutionary Art and Computers" this program is supposed to perform roughly the same function as that set out in that book.

Requirements

• An IBM PC compatible with a 386 or better processor
• A co-processor (very useful, though not strictly needed)
• A VGA or super VGA display with a VESA driver.
• A text editor, such as DOS's EDIT.
• at least 2Mb of extended memory.
• Runs as DOS or Windows program (both supplied)

• Coming soonish (in a couple of months or so)
• A Linux machine with a gif viewer. (only renders to a memory image which it saves as GIF files).

FTP SITE

REGISTRATION.

LEGAL STUFF

CONVERSIONS

I am planning on releasing the source code in the next couple of months, after I have "tidied" it up.

Artists who have used FORM

Dan Farmer

Dan Farmer is one of the original POV Ray team, and was one of the first people to my knowledge to produce a raytraced form.

Visionaries T-Shirts: Psiberspace Tencycles

Some more here

Form on a tee shirt!

Russ McClay

Math art gallery at transend

More art from Russ McClay at OTIS rmfrm*.jpg

Gallery

Credits and Thanks

• UNIVESA and SVGAKIT came from Kendall Bennett. I no longer use this but it was a useful springbard.
• FLEX the lexical analyser came from the GNU project
• BYACC the parser came from heaven knows where!
• The GIF encoder is a very mutilated version of the one in Fractint. Thanks to the stone soup team, for making their source freely available. ( and for sstools.ini , you should see the junk in mine!)
• The PNG encoder is the public domain version, without ANY changes!
• The palette used for display in 256 colour mode is FRACTINT's ALT.MAP.
• Thanks to the people who published code from Graphics Gems I, II and III. While very little of their code finally ended up in FORM many of the display routines were originally tested using their code. The Graphics Gems collection was a real godsend and should be in your source code collection. It can be retreived from http://www.acm.org/tog/GraphicsGems/.

• PANTEK Ltd for allowing me to release this.
• Stephen Todd and William Latham for the inspiration and a good book.
  Evolutionary Art and Computers, Todd and Latham, Academic Press, ISBN 0-12-437185-X
• Andrew Pearmund for providing a much needed get_pixel function without which FORM couldn't save any pictures, and for breaking the program it every time I showed it to him.
• Sue Cunningham for being with me, and constantly praising my feeblest efforts at creativity, and finally showing me the sort of form that could be created! I still feel shocked looking at them. Most of her forms are included with this release.
• Robert Fargher for being the first person who sent me a FORM, and for praising FORM.
• Dan Farmer for many suggestions and encouragement. And for rendering some exquisite textures, take a look at NACRE in Dans Gallery.