Edit: The generator app is finished! click here to view the generator.
I’m working on a new generator – kumihimo style. More specifically – I am programming an application that can produce images of patterns. I have gotten further than my previous attempts. I guess I was too eager to get in finished before, but this time I took each step very carefully. The Kumihimo tying technique is quite different from other techniques in many ways (such as normal and alpha). You make a bracelet by braiding in a kumihimo disk and keeping the strings in a specific order. How the colors map from the disk to the resulting pattern is more complicated than both the normal and alpha bracelets together. However, I got it right after a few hours of drawing on paper and debugging.
Thanks to the users of Friendship-Bracelets.net that uploaded some kumihimo patterns to the kumihimo tutorial. I used some of those to see that everything worked in the new generator. Here are some previews. They are not available anywhere but here (yet).
Have you done some Kumihimo and got some advice to me when designing this generator? Please comment! I have just made one whole bracelet in my whole life.
The tech part of this generator is not that complicated. It is 100% PHP code that uses the GD library to produce a PNG file. GD has got simple and few functions for drawing – but it is way enough for this kind of application, and it saves some load on the server.
I also worked some on a JavaScript version. I simply ported the code from PHP manually and created a jQuery plugin to wrap things up nice. Click the image below to try it out.
The next step is to integrate this generator into the site, and make it render pattern images when needed. Stay tuned for more updates!
Stefan
