Rotating perspectives

I have been asked to unveil a bit of what’s under the hood on this post. I decided to make a new post to share how my creative process took place and maybe inspire others to play along.

Something interesting about all of this is how well it plays into common sense. Looking at things from a different perspective, in this case adding just a rotation, can yield outstanding results.

The shapes

First of all, we are going to use the shapes provided by ggforce::geom_regon().

Code

library(tidyverse)
library(ggforce)

df <- data.frame(
  x0=3:8,
  y0=1,
  r=0.2
)

ggplot(df)+
  geom_regon(aes(x0 = x0, y0 = y0,
                 r = r, sides= x0, angle = 0),
             fill="gray50", color="black")+
  coord_equal()+
  labs(title="Regular polygons using ggforce", 
       x="", y="",
       caption="@NeuroMLA")+
  theme(panel.background = element_blank(),
        axis.text.y = element_blank(),
        axis.ticks.y = element_blank(),
        plot.title = element_text(hjust=0.5))

The twist

Now we can implement a rotation to each figure. We will use the previous df and expand_grid() to add an angle rotation to the regular polygon. The greater the number of sides, the closer we get to a circular shape illusion when we rotate and overlap the polygons. For n>6 it didn’t generate the type of look I was looking after during my experimentation.

Code

df <- expand_grid(df, angle = seq(0, 0.5, 0.1))

 
ggplot(df)+
  # notice we use angle = angle now
  geom_regon(aes(x0=x0,y0=y0,r=r, sides=x0, angle=angle),
             fill="gray50", color="black")+
  coord_equal()+
  labs(title="Rotated regular polygons using ggforce", 
       x="", y="",
       caption="@NeuroMLA")+
  theme(panel.background = element_blank(),
        axis.text.y = element_blank(),
        axis.ticks.y = element_blank(), 
        plot.title = element_text(hjust=0.5))

We can tinker with the alpha and fill to make some nice looking shapes. I’m not going to modify color but it’s also a possibility.

Code

ggplot(df)+
  # notice we use angle = angle now and fil=factor(x0)
  geom_regon(aes(x0=x0,y0=y0,r=r, sides=x0, angle=angle,
                 fill=factor(x0)), 
             alpha=0.1, color="black")+
  coord_equal()+
  labs(title="Rotated regular polygons using ggforce", 
       x="", y="",
       caption="@NeuroMLA")+
  theme(panel.background = element_blank(),
        legend.position = "none",
        axis.text.y = element_blank(),
        axis.ticks.y = element_blank(),
        plot.title = element_text(hjust=0.5)) -> p

print(p)

Make it pallette

We can have unlimited color combinations. Just as a start, two places I like to use when dealing with color pallettes in R:

• R Color Brewer Pallettes
• Adobe Color Picker

We will use scale_fill_*() functions of ggplot. I normally use scale_fill_manual() if I want to handpick the values, but scale_fill_viridis() and scale_fill_brewer() often do a nice job too!

Reuse

Citation

BibTeX citation:

@online{andina2021,
  author = {Andina, Matias},
  title = {Rotating Perspectives},
  date = {2021-01-03},
  url = {https://matiasandina.com/posts/2021-01-03-rotating-perspectives},
  langid = {en}
}

For attribution, please cite this work as:

Andina, Matias. 2021. “Rotating Perspectives.” January 3, 2021. https://matiasandina.com/posts/2021-01-03-rotating-perspectives.