Author: Carolyn McCawley

Principles of Animation

For this animation sketch, I tried to show the principles of solid animation, slow in and slow out, and arcs. Originally, I wanted to recreate a basketball bouncing up and down and slowing down because of gravity. Then after I accidentally changed a variable, it created what looked like a basketball being bounced towards the screen. I thought this animation looked a lot cooler so I decided to go with it. It appears as though the ball travels in an arc towards the viewer’s screen. Also, it looks as though the basketball speeds up mid-bounce; the basketball starts slow, speeds up as it gets closer to the screen and then slows down again when it is right in front of the viewer. The hardest part was trying to incorporate solid animation; I wanted to make a sphere rather than just an ellipse. I had to make my sketch 3D; I explored the processing website to learn about how to control the ball’s location and how to make the shape bigger and smaller.

https://www.openprocessing.org/sketch/509171

Interactive Sketch (Carolyn and Morgan)

For the interaction sketch, Morgan and I created a rotating square that enlarges and shrinks depending on the location of the mouse. The square rotates at a random speed using a global variable. The speed of the rectangle randomly goes a value up until, but not including, 0.5. When a key is pressed, the rectangle changes to a random hue of color. When the mouse is clicked, the background changes to random saturation value for red.

While creating the sketch, we were successful in rotation, color changing, mouseX and mouseY because these functions are familiar to us. However, we had problems with order of operations in our code. We struggled with layering our functions correctly so that the background wasn’t overlapping everything. While moving from processing to openprocessing, we noticed that our sketch was very large, and it altered the interactions on the sketch because the screen wasn’t big enough. Overall the project was successful and if we knew how to, we would have the shape rotate while moving with the mouse’s location and have the shape change when a key is pressed.

 

https://www.openprocessing.org/sketch/506176

Self-Portrait

I thought drawing the portrait was hard until I had to recreate it in processing. Compared to drawing, coding the portrait was much harder. While working in processing, there was a lot of trial and error and studying the processing website to figure out how exactly to use the functions. The biggest challenge in changing mediums was the lack of control; in processing, it was difficult to gauge where you were since the program works on a grid system. Additionally, coding anything curved or odd shaped was extremely challenging. I found making the hair the hardest part because there are a lot of different curves and hair is typically not one shade, and I had to compromise and make it one rather than doing fifty different strands and shades. Coding in processing was much more time consuming and I felt as though I was making a lot of compromises because I could not replicate my drawing perfectly.