Automating color-blocking subdivision

[mohovilka (Ilya)]

Hello,

I work on a script for subdividing building facades into large color blocks (color-blocking), like in the attached references

Current logic Usually, my algorithm works through a combination of a randomizer and attractor points:

1. The facade plane is divided into a grid of cells.

2. I manually place points in space.

3. The script groups cells that fall within the radius of these points (using “point in cylinder” logic) and colors them.

Color_Blocking.gh (1.1 MB)

The problem This process is currently too manual and not very convenient. I have to move the points every time to find a good composition. And i feel like my approach with the randomizer is a bit off because I can’t seem to get it to generate large enough blocks

What I want to achieve I am looking for a way to fully automate this. I need the composition — including block sizes, positions, and proportions — to be generated procedurally. Ideally, I’d like a single seed slider that changes the entire variation.

Questions

1. What is the best way to randomize the position and “strength” of attractors so they don’t overlap chaotically but create a balanced composition?

2. Is there a more efficient way to group cells into rectangular blocks other than my current distance-based logic?

I would be very grateful for any ideas or examples of similar logic!

[mohovilka (Ilya)]

[inno]

from the images looks like there are two colors shared among the buildings: S1, S2

then there are 3 main colors: each building gets one of those plus its lighter version, and they are red, green and “Mouse”

so for each building you end up for instance with [ (Red_1 & Red_2) + (Shared_1 & Shared_2) ]

a given “solid” (whole unique building) will have one of the above set of colors distributed on its vertical faces

do you want to strictly imitate this?

[edit] I ignored the fact that where shared color S2 is present (grey) the facade is split in two horizontally and the top part gets white

[mohovilka (Ilya)]

@inno

do you want to strictly imitate this?

Yes, you’ve really got the gist of it! That’s exactly what I’m aiming for—to create not just a random pattern generator, but a design code. It would be interesting to try your approach: each building gets its own unique palette (for example, 2–3 shades of the main colour)

[mohovilka (Ilya)]

Maybe something like this?

Color_Blocking_v2.gh (120.3 KB)

I decided not to implement the strict logic with color themes (Red/Green/Mouse). I wanted to keep the script a bit simpler and just achieve an effect of randomized color blocks across all surfaces. However, instead of a standard Random component, I used a Spatial Hashing method: I took the X, Y, and Z coordinates of each facade’s centroid, ran them through math operations (division, rounding, and multiplication), and used the resulting value as the Seed for the Random node.

[mohovilka (Ilya)]

@mohovilka

not just a random pattern generator, but a design code

Ideally, it would be great to have colour sets like this, but I’ve moved away from that concept