Category: Midterm Week 1

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