Tyler Hobbs is a generative artist who writes about making algorithmic art, including flow fields and watercolor simulation.
Commenters point to his work as professional-quality generative art and use his watercolor guide, praising how he documents his process.
I work in the crypto industry right now - my job is to keep bad guys from stealing XXX millions of dollars. I've also worked on a team that has done the tech side of several record breaking NFT's sales. And I've sold my own NFTS for fun, and strangers have bought them (wat!).
I'm not a "believer". Crypto is indeed full of idiots - and scammers - and crazy people who will say anything to see the token they hold go up - and scammers - and crazy people chasing a 100x buck - and more scammers. And even ignoring the scams, it's like living in an alternate Alice-in-Wonderland world where the rules of normal physics, normal economics, and normal society no longer seem to apply. It is truly a frothing zoo of non-normality.
And yet I'm not a "skeptic" either. There are really, really hard technological problems out there, and there are really wonderful people working on them. In the middle of the economic silliness, there's a lot of new things around groups and economics being tried. And amidst the flurry of insanity in NFT world, there is some genuinely good art being created.
For example, take the stuff this person creates (https://tylerxhobbs.com/fidenza). The process of making it is exactly the kind of stuff hackernews loves, and it is genuinely good art. It's stuff I put on the wall. The whole game around who gets to pay a stupid amount of money to say they own it (https://opensea.io/assets/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/78000313) of them doesn't diminish the fact…
One of the better ones I've found is Tyler Hobbes [0].
I recently found the "Bridges Archive" online [1]. It's a goldmine of ideas (I won't link to them but they have tilings, space filling algorithms, multi-scale Truchet patterns and many more).
I favor the ideas rather than the implementation as I already know how to program so you may do better with learning something like processing/p5.js [2].
In terms of raw ideas, I've found Jared Tarbell to be a huge inspiration [3] [4].
I'm sure I'll get lashed on here for the mere mention of NFTs but I've found there are consistently awesome generative art being displayed on Twitter for artists showing their work and advertising their NFTs for sale. One resource that I've found to be pretty consistently good is fxhash.xyz [5] [6]. Looking for #fxhash tags on Twitter will probably give you rich results.
I also have my own NFTs whose source code I've released as CC0 if you want to take a look [7] (none are for sale right now) along with a half assed attempt at making a list of resources for generative art [8].
There's plenty of "awesome" generative art lists [9] as well as many examples and other projects on p5.js [2]. And of course there's always Reddit [10] [11].
Oh and "Coding Train" is deceptively deep, packing complex ideas in a kind of "cutesy" veneer but still managing to tackle topics that run the gamut of easy to incredibly difficult [12].
There's really too many resources to list. It depends on what level you're at.…
Learn a polygon-modeling tool. The obvious choice is Blender, but Houdini and Cinema4d are also good alternatives if you're willing to pay up.
Learn the basics, a little bit of sub-division modeling (it'll take a month of youtube tutorials to get that down), a little bit of particles work, a little bit of lighting setups, a little bit of generator/matrix/cloner functions, flow fields and forces, etc. in your chosen modeling tool.
When you have this down, dive into programming -- Blender and Cinema4d can let you do a lot with python coding and geometry/scene nodes; likewise for Houdini but with a custom DSL called 'Vex'. And that's where a lot of magic is done.
If you're a particularly talented programmer, you can skip that part and write your own ray-tracing code like Michl (https://www.instagram.com/iamasoyboy/) or otherwise do 2d-stuff like Tyler: https://tylerxhobbs.com/essays/2020/flow-fields
Keep exploring and checking out what others are doing. There's r/generative: https://www.reddit.com/r/generative/top/?t=all et al. for inspiration.
In comments, artists will more often than not share the code they use to come up with their art.
Again, I think the act of "owning" it creates a much different relationship between the collector and that art than simply looking at it. They have skin in the game because they either spent money on the piece, or were able to mint it by being in the right place at the right time.
To be sure, a lot of the "advocacy" is exactly what you describe, where people are just trying to push their bags. But the advocacy I'm talking about is more about the social element of discussing the art with other people in the community.
The website is certainly a valid way to display a limited generative art collection, but it's a different experience. It means that the artist _can_ curate the collection and hide some of the rough edges of the algorithm... but then it loses some of its magic. NFTs have sort of enabled a new sub genre of generative art [1].
[1] https://tylerxhobbs.com/essays/2021/the-rise-of-long-form-generative-art
The source code is visible on-chain - it can be queried from the smart contract, but also it has been etched into the data of the “script upload” transaction. This is how ArtBlocks and other projects can fetch the script and display it. But that doesn’t mean the code is open source! Just like scripts on a website (which are also easy to see), the author decides on how to license the work.
I often suggest GenerativeArtistry as a simple starting point if you already know a bit of JavaScript and want to understand how it works on a basic level[1]. Tyler Hobbs' blog (OP link) also has some great essays on generative art[2], as with the blog of Anders Hoff[3], and also lots of other resources in awesome-creative-coding repo[4].
[1] - https://generativeartistry.com/
[2] - https://tylerxhobbs.com/essays
[3] - https://inconvergent.net/#writing
[4] - https://github.com/terkelg/awesome-creative-coding
Creating a watercolor filter which can be applied to an image dragged into a website <canvas> element is on my list of Fun Things To Do Over The Holidays - but having previously looked at the the mechanics that need to feed into the filter ... well it looks like I'd be jumping down a rabbit hole of complex maths and generative art approaches[1][2]. It's a complex problem space and I'm not sure I have the brain power and tenacity to do a good job of it.
[1] - Tyler Hobbs (2017) - a guide to simulating watercolor paint with generative art - https://tylerxhobbs.com/essays/2017/a-generative-approach-to-simulating-watercolor-paints
[2] - Curtis|Anderson|Seims|Fleischery|Salesin (undated) - Computer-Generated Watercolor - https://grail.cs.washington.edu/projects/watercolor/paper_small.pdf