How To Make Turing Patterns | Strangely Organic, Eye Catching Patterns

Maker_Tales · October 2, 2020, 3:53pm

So over the last few weeks, I kept seeing these curious patters come up on my graphic design orientated feeds. Patterns that look strangely organic as you see them on things such are coral reefs. I’ve created a short video of the information I have found on how to recreate these patterns In a free manor. Plus If all that button pressing to get some “simple” patterns seems a bit much… I’ve also made a collection of 50 Pre-made and vectorized turing patterns for the price of a nice coffee on my Etsy.

A few little test projects using Turing Patterns:

jamely · October 2, 2020, 3:58pm

Very cool, and it will be neat to see the puzzles that you come up with! Are the patterns in your Etsy shop filled paths? I can’t really tell from the tiny pictures or the description. And the listing says “Be if Laser cutting projects or poster prints”, which I think means “Best for laser…”
Awesome video share!

Maker_Tales · October 2, 2020, 4:01pm

Hey Jamely,
Ya i’m looking forward to making the puzzles. Ya I’m still fleshing out the etsy currently. It’s all vector files to there “lines”. The cam filled but can easily be changed to just lines while designing. Thanks for pointing that out I’ll sort that out now. And thank you I’m glad you enjoyed the video

henryhbk · October 2, 2020, 4:08pm

A lot of natural growth patterns are fractal patterns, which makes the math “understandable” (not by “normal” people, but at least people with math knowledge). So much of what you see is similar to a Mandelbrot set (like look at leaf growth)

cynd11 · October 2, 2020, 5:00pm

Very cool—I’m bookmarking this!

eflyguy · October 6, 2020, 8:40am

Great video, got me interested in digging deeper and I found a cool solution - you can create these quickly in Gimp, there is a plugin available here:

Example. Took 5 seconds to generate:

Inkscape centerline trace of above:

kittski · October 11, 2020, 3:56am

Found this cool turning generator.

https://rreusser.github.io/multiscale-turing-patterns/#a=0.05&a=0.04&a=-0.03&a=0.02&a=0.02&a=0.01&ar=250&ar=45&ar=20&ar=10&ar=3&ar=1&c=%235169e1&c=%232626d9&c=%231986e6&c=%23197fe6&c=%237f26d9&c=%23ff9e9e&div=no&halt=0&ir=500&ir=90&ir=40&ir=20&ir=6&ir=2&k=circular&k=circular&k=circular&k=circular&k=circular&k=circular&pr=1&s=256&scale=0&scale2=0&seed=0

kittski · October 11, 2020, 4:00am

Oh wow, lots of cool stuff on the main page! The erosion one is especially fun.

mariacarrera64 · October 11, 2020, 9:12pm

tobyschachman · November 12, 2020, 11:29pm

Very cool! I had seen these reaction-diffusion patterns before but didn’t realize you could make them with iterated Photoshop filters like this.

I found this short paper by following the links on your YouTube video. It explains the math of how this works:

Looks like you can start your “seed image” with just monochromatic noise (don’t need the clouds). Then repeatedly run Gaussian Blur (5px), Unsharp Mask (100%, 10px, 0). Those parameters are from the paper, I imagine you could tune them to get different sized Turing Patterns.