Snowmaker

We asked artist/designer Brendan Dawes to write a few notes about his thinking and the process behind the “Snowy Evening” artwork. 

When Jim Coudal messaged me to say he had a crazy idea for the Field Notes Winter Edition, wondering if it was possible to make 99,999 unique snowflakes, I immediately said yes. The truth was, I wasn’t sure, but the challenge was too enticing to pass up.

Nature, Then Science

Over the last few years, the majority of my generative work has been created in a thing called Houdini, a very powerful piece of software used in the CGI and VFX industry. I find it incredibly playful to use. I can place nodes into a “network,” and wire them up together with my own code to create high quality rendered visuals. So using Houdini, I started to build a procedural system to create snowflakes, inspired by a great white paper by Kenneth G. Libbrecht on how snowflakes are formed, together with various pointers from around the Internet.

Using different parameters, I could dictate how a snowflake is formed. That was all fine, but I didn’t just want one snowflake from my pushing these parameters around, but 99,999 – and they all needed to be unique. After some research, I discovered this is where Houdini’s “Procedural Dependency Graph” comes in. It allowed me to chain a series of parameters together to work in an exponential way. For example if I had ten changes to a parameter within a certain range, I could chain that to another ten changes for a different parameter. This would output one hundred renders (ten times ten), all of them unique.

Testing some early renders of the snowflakes, I realized that creating 99,999 generative snowflakes using a fully 3D-rendered route was not going to be realistic, both from a time and money point of view. Yet, out of constraints often comes something greater, when you’re forced to look at things anew through the lens of simplicity. So I started working with a flat 2D composition generated from the original 3D geometry.

This technique allowed me to create a line-art version of the snowflakes, something that could be rendered at high resolution in around twenty seconds (give or take). However, just turning some geometry into line art didn’t look right. I wanted these forms, whilst a celebration of digital technology, to have a softer, more organic feel. To do that, I first softened the look of the geometry a few times, and then finally created a Voronoi triangulation of the form, making sure the triangles weren’t just one size, but adaptive across the geometry so things were more visually interesting. This had the effect of giving the shapes a nice natural feel, as if they picked up a few little quirks as they fell through the sky.

Once we were all happy with the look of these snowflakes, including some test prints to get the stroke width just right, two machines were pressed into action to generate the thousands of images. In total in took around three days to generate the images. However, things weren’t finished just yet. We thought it would be a good idea to shuffle the numbering of each flake, so I made use of a handy file renaming utility to rip through all the files. The final stage was to convert the images into the correct resolution and size whilst at the same time changing the bit depth to one color. This had the effect of reducing the total file size from over 1TB to around 22GB – all helping to make production as efficient as possible for Field Notes HQ and the printer.