Month: February 2018

For my midterm, I want to create a mini ecosystem relating to sharks and fishes. The sharks would be able to eat the fishes, and its body parts would be affected by multiple things such as the amount of fishes it ate and the various kinds of fish it ate. If the shark eats harmful fish accidentally, it would get sick and die. I want the overall piece to act like a game but also as an art piece demonstrating relationships between animals. The final piece would have graphic effects such as blood stains, and the fish would move in a cyclical pattern flowing through the water, while the shark would move randomly trying to eat its prey. People would first generate how many fish they would want there to be on the screen, and then when they’re done, they can wreak havoc by creating a shark with a keypress.  I want to use the colors of underwater, make fishes relatively colorful, and the shark grey.  The composition would look like an aquarium turned into a war zone.

I will rely heavily on classes. The sharks would definitely need their own class so the body parts can be properties in processing and altered when fish are “eaten”.  I will also rely on my skills on animating to make a dynamic aquarium, so the fish can look and feel alive. I need to learn about optimal mathematical relationships and more knowledge about how to use classes properly.

I drew some inspiration from a relatively recent viewing of blue planet, so I am now more fascinated by the ocean life. It might be seen as ironic that I would want to create a scenario where death of fishes is optimal after watching this documentary, but it’s more about showing how fishes can evolve to protect themselves in nature. Hopefully, I can implement more species into this aquarium sketch.

 

My midterm project will be a sketch of a square universe. While looking for inspirations, I came across a tutorial about recursion, which is putting a function within the same function to achieve something like a loop but different. After following the tutorial I played around with it and came up with a really cool spaceship looking diamond object made up of millions of squares. Then I rotated the whole recursion and used the scale to zoom into the object to reveal a universe of squares.

At this point, I’ve used variables, functions, scale, rotate, conditional, and interaction in my sketch.

This part of the project asked to incorporate classes into the sketch, but I had difficulty executing recursion with a class. I need to figure out how to do this for part 2, because I have two objects moving separately, and I would like to organize them in classes.

I have a pretty solid vision for this project. First, the sketch starts off with a close up of rectangular recursion, which looks like an ancient pattern of some sort. Then with the arrow key people will be able to zoom out to reveal the diamond shape and orbiting circles. However, once people reach a certain point of scale, the diamond breaks apart into a galaxy of squares. Then the sketch zooms into the galaxy.

My initial sketch has some minor problems with the interaction, but the most urgent issue for next week will be incorporating classes.

Inspiration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3Facu6ZVeA&t=4s

*When I was uploading the sketch on OpenProcessing, it worked initially, but after saving it does not show anything because of an unexpected identifier. The program still works on Processing.

https://www.openprocessing.org/sketch/512849

Here is a screen recording of my sketch for now.

The midterm sketch I added was basically small video game. I made mouse point as a needle, you can hit the randomly falling balloon by moving the mouse point horizontally. For the midterm sketch, I calculated objects and oriented programing. It might be easier that I could array all the objects. I will figure out how to array objects effectively. (with out using A,B,C,D,E.. groups).  For this sketch, I did not make acceleration for balloons. Also, I need to figure how balloon and needle meets together .

 

For my midterm project, I wanted to create an interactive sunflower that moves and grows with different interactions.

Over the 2 week process, I hope to apply the more recent tools of animation through computation to develop the sketch into a more dynamic product. Furthermore, I found the most recent class on “classes” extremely useful in developing a more organised workflow with coding in processing. I hope to utilise this to see which elements of the sketch can be enhanced and brought to life – including the background as well as the main sunflower. Ultimately my main aim is to make the Sunflower, or at least parts of it, grow into themselves when the program is first run, after which different elements can be manipulated in different ways; e.g. shifting speed in the rotation of petals, and a convincing and animated background that mimics a Van Gogh painting.

Making the initial sketch was relatively simple. I’ve found myself becoming more intuitive when creating shapes using the grid system, as well as performing basic animation functions on different shapes that can operate independently of each-other (for example the two sets of petals that spin in different directions.

However, I keep running into issues in creating my first class (for the petals). For some reason, the positioning is affected when I try, although the petals themselves still rotate accordingly and change color. Even more frustrating is that the sketch doesn’t appear at all when imported into OpenProcessing.

ORIGINAL SKETCH 1 PAGE: https://www.openprocessing.org/sketch/512825

SKETCH WITH PETAL CLASS: https://www.openprocessing.org/sketch/512616

I’ve written and dealt with classes before, in Python and C++. The syntax for Java isn’t to different but I was putting curly braces in places I wouldn’t have thought I needed to. I kept getting an error with my the curly braces in my class so I commented it out and just manually generated the object I wanted to create in the set up and draw functions. I kind of want to recreate something similar to a wall of disco balls. I’m gonna need a lot more practice with the 3D render and user interaction.  The way user interaction maybe implemented is that every time the user clicks the screen, a different disco beat will play and the disco balls will change colors.  We haven’t learned how to incorporate audio yet but I’ll Just watch a video and read the documentation about how to do so.

https://www.openprocessing.org/sketch/512813

My inspiration for the project was the background picture on my laptop which is the night sky. Originally, I wanted to create a solar system where the user can interact with it and add stars and constellations. I changed my mind after seeing a picture of a shooting star and decided to implement that idea. In my final sketch, I hope to have a house with a tree in the backyard where the user can create the stars in the sky by clicking their mouse and simulate a shooting star by hitting a key on their keyboard.

I have already created my House, Star, Tree, and Moon classes and I still need to finish the Moon and Star class and create the shooting star effect. Right now, the color of the roof, door, and house change randomly, but I may refine the colors or limit their changes. The color of the tree changes randomly to simulate the changing of the seasons. White represents winter, pale pink represents summer, green represents spring, and orange represents autumn. I have used the mousepressed function to allow the user to add stars in the sky, by next week I would like to have the stars rotate in the sky. I have created multiple classes and used if statements. To finish the project, I need to learn more about arrays and rotation.

 

https://www.openprocessing.org/sketch/512793

The basic framework for the sketch I made over the first week is very random. It consists of a character that bounces wall to wall – every time it bounces it’s face and expression change back and forth from a rectangle to an ellipse. The color and general shape change as well, and 8 smaller ellipses are released upon collision with the walls. At any point, the user can take over the character with the arrow keys on the keyboard. Clicking the mouse will produce a spinning “flower” at the point clicked.

Over the next week of this process, I would really like to expand on my current sketch by fleshing out the character a little more. I really don’t know what the final product will look like, but I’d like it to be some sort of game where the character’s expression changes every time an event happens – for instance, a painful expression might appear when it collides with the spinning “flower.”

To do this, I will definitely need to utilize classes and objects, to make all my code efficient and to make user experience easy. After learning arrays and GUIs, I might use them to add to my sketch or even take it to a whole other direction. I mostly draw inspiration from what we do in class, where we do a lot of examples with bouncing balls and I wanted to take that to the next level.

Link to sketch on openprocessing:

https://www.openprocessing.org/sketch/512801