Description

The maze blur is a semi-painterly effect that modifies the pixels of an underlying image during the process of drawing a random maze. A variety of output effects are possible by altering various parameters of the maze generation algorithm.

Applets

MazeBlur01 300 x 300

Algorithm

This maze generation algorithm is not optimal. Rather it was chosen because of its interesting pattern of development. As the maze develops, color from the underlying image is dragged along the path of the maze leading to interesting decompositions of the original image.

Maze generation begins with a single maze "walker" which traverses the image space in a sort of random Brownian motion. Motion is constrained a bit to avoid running off the edge of the image space and doubling back on the path already travelled. The walker object may then spawn subsequent walkers at random points along its path. Each separate walker object creates its own unique "stroke" of color.

The maze itself is not typically displayed, only the results of its creation. The applet above allows you to toggle the display of the maze path to illustrate the underlying structure.

Whenever a walker encounters a dead end - surrounded by areas of maze that have already been travelled - it hops on the existing path and retraces a new route hoping to find new empty areas to explore.

The applet above allows you to toggle the display of these retraces and provides and interesting animation as the maze evolves and colors are repeatedly dragged along existing paths.

Gallery

Single pass of mazeblur using various settings:

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The blur can also be applied repeatedly, using the output of one pass as the input to the next, creating very drastic blurring even at single-pixel maze resolution:

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And for reference, here is the original:

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Inspiration

Not sure why I'm including this, but... Sitting at a coffee shop, doing a crossword puzzle, flipped the page and found a maze, drawn as if in a garden. Thus inspired the idea of maze-ifying a real picture of a garden. At the time I didn't know what exactly that might mean, and certainly hadn't fully conceived the effect as presented here. Nonetheless, the ideas was born, and doodling commenced:

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