Turtle Graphics Spiral In C#

As another example of what you can do with graphics in C#, I decided to recreate a famous Turtle Graphics spiral design. I can’t find an official name for this classic design. I decided to call it Spiral of Circles. It has a nautilus shape but you won’t find any sample code by doing a search on “Turtle Graphics nautilus”. There is a version of this design using squares. I did have the code for creating this design using Python or Processing. It took a little experimentation to reproduce it in C#. Part of the solution was to realize that radians needed to be converted to degrees which is why I included the conversion functions in the code. This design requires a rotate and a translate transformation within a loop. I’m not sure you really need to use a GraphicsPath object because I tried that before I solved the other problems.


using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.ComponentModel;
using System.Data;
using System.Drawing;
using System.Drawing.Drawing2D;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Windows.Forms;

namespace SpiralOfCircles
{
    public partial class Form1 : Form
    {

        System.Drawing.Graphics graphicsObj;

        public Form1()
        {
            InitializeComponent();
        }

        private void Form1_Paint(object sender, PaintEventArgs e)
        {
            graphicsObj = this.CreateGraphics();

            // Set the SmoothingMode property to smooth the lines.
            graphicsObj.SmoothingMode = System.Drawing.Drawing2D.SmoothingMode.AntiAlias;

            // This centers what is drawn. Adjusted by 50 pixels.
            graphicsObj.TranslateTransform((graphicsObj.VisibleClipBounds.Width / 2) + 50, (graphicsObj.VisibleClipBounds.Height / 2) - 50, MatrixOrder.Append);
            // This scales everything up
            graphicsObj.ScaleTransform(2, 2);

            // Create pen.
            Pen blackPen = new Pen(Color.Black, 1);

            for (int i = 0; i < 50; i++)
            {
                graphicsObj.RotateTransform((float)degrees((-Math.PI / 18)));

                // Create a GraphicsPath object
                GraphicsPath path = new GraphicsPath();

                // Draw a circle
                path.AddEllipse(0, 0, -i * 3, -i * 3);

                // Create a Matrix object  
                Matrix X = new Matrix();
                X.Translate(i, 0);

                // Apply transformation  
                path.Transform(X);
                graphicsObj.DrawPath(blackPen, path);
            }
        }

        /// <summary>
        /// Function to convert degrees to radians
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="degrees">degree value</param>
        /// <returns>equivalent radian value</returns>
        public static double radians(double degrees)
        {
            double radians = (Math.PI / 180) * degrees;
            return (radians);
        }

        /// <summary>
        /// Function to convert radians to degree 
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="radians">radian value</param>
        /// <returns>equivalent degree value</returns>
        public static double degrees(double radians)
        {
            double degrees = (180 / Math.PI) * radians;
            return (degrees);
        }
    }
}
Spiral Of Circles

Spiral Of Circles

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