DSDN142 Creative Coding: Final Images

Adaptable Form Final Images

Code for the Initial Form and the morphing of it.

The top left of the board is my initial form, and the remaining four forms in the first sequence were created by changing the values of the scale and angle variables, incrementing for the angle and incrementing and de-incrementing for the scale.

The second sequence of forms focused on changing angle, scale and rotation by incrementing and de-incrementing the values.

For the third sequence only the values for stroke weight and scale were changed. I found while iterating through values that the form slowly started taking on the form of a circle and by playing around with the values a bit more, the circle became more pronounced. Then when I continued to increment the stroke weight and scale values the circle slowly morphed into a square. The solidity of the forms surprised me as I had expected that by playing around with scale and line weight only, all that would happen would be a bulbous blobby mess slowly growing into just a white screen.

For the final two sequences, I played around with all the variables, so width, height, scale, angle, rotation and line weight all got a go at morphing the form from its original shape into new ones. I took the approach of “what if” when doing these, just to see what sort of forms could be achieved and how long it would take for it to dissolve into mere lines.

A snapshot of the form was saved every fifth frame.

I like variety of changes that have occurred while playing around with the variable’s values, some very beautiful forms have appeared, the fourth sequence for instance reminds me of music. I am not 100% happy however with the layout of my board, I feel that the third sequence is out-of-place in terms of how it looks from the rest, but the changes that took place were so great that I felt it fitted the concept of the project. Perhaps it would have been better placed as the last set of images instead of in the middle as it is, it feels too dominant due to the large amount of white.

DSDN142 Creative Coding: Images

These images were generated by changing the angle, scale, height and width values in a random order.

DSDN142 Creative Coding: Sequence 1

This is the set of form experimentation snapshots that sequence one of the board comes from.

DSDN142 Creative Coding: Precedents & Doodlings

I went looking for inspiration everywhere while doodling forms on my own as well. I am doing MATH161 and found graph theory was full of nifty forms such as the ones at math cove.net. I particularly liked the ones in Fig 7.3. Two depictions of the icosahedron in Lesson 7: Platonic Graphs. I then found a site on the geometry of crop circles which had some beautiful forms that appear quite complex that I thought could be cool to play around with.

I also like the shapes in the compass on the Skyrim map from The Elder Scrolls game.

Skyrim map compass symbol (Bethesda Softworks, 2011)

References:

Janssen, B. (1997). Crop circle geometry. Retrieved from: http://cropcircleconnector.com/Bert/bert98e.html

Bethesda Softworks. (2011). Skyrim: The Elder Scrolls.

DSDN142 Creative Coding: Reflections

I haven’t been blogging as regularly as I should have been. I get caught up in looking for inspiration, learning and writing code and playing around with the shapes I make and then never get round to blogging about. So I guess part of today is going to include blogging everything I would’ve blogged about earlier had I not been so slack.

I have found myself a bit at a loss during the studio time and don’t get much achieved, I think because I am not comfortable making mistakes in the class environment. I’m much happier experimenting and playing around with the code to create shapes into various forms at home where no one but me can see me make mistakes. Which is crazy because I learn more through the mistake making than by.

Anyway, I am going to do several posts throughout today to catch up on the blogging and keep each post focussed on one topic.

DSDN142 Creative Coding: Inspiration

At the beginning of the course we had a look at openprocessing.org to get an idea for what can be done with the Processing application. There was a lot of very cool stuff on there. Two of the sketches I liked were:
Processing code: Visualising Text by Diana Lange
Flickr: ‘Visualising Text’ Images

This is a video clip of her code in action.

I liked that this sketch is a visual representation of a poem’s words, as reading is one of my favourite activities. There is something beautiful about the way the sorting of the text becomes a sort of circular web.

The second sketch is by Teodor Michalski called Triangle Party. This one I found fun as the viewer can interact with the triangles with the mouse. It reminds me of a Chinese dragon in the way it twists, and the triangles are reminiscent of dragon scales.

DSDN 142 Creative Coding: Form Manipulation

So I am still getting used to learning exactly how to use Processing. It’s going slowly, but I think the issue is I haven’t finalised a form I want to manipulate for the project and I haven’t sat there and played around enough with the application.

This is the form I created today’s studio.

Processing Sketch 1

I manipulated the distance between the points of the square to make it 100 pixels wider in height and width each time.

It’s not very adventurous. I need to push past the limits I impose upon myself.

DSDN142 Creative Coding: Reflections on the lecture and first tutorial

Tuesday’s tutorial was primarily to get administrivia out-of-the-way and introduce us to the idea of the amount of breakdown needed to create a set of instructions that someone could take away and create an object from, or that could be used as an instruction set for a computer program. I don’t know why I picked my glasses to try write a set of drawing instructions for, as they turned out to be hard to describe. I think the major problem for me was trying to describe the type of curve that needed to be drawn to represent the curve of the frame. I had no idea how to do it. I ended up trying to describe it using length and the word curve and how far above or below the end point should finish in relation to the start point. As it turned out when my partner for the exercise tried to draw the image from the instructions, things did not go well and while there were curves in the drawing they were nothing like my glasses. There were also no verticals as there should of been. Kind of makes me think I have a bit of practicing I need to do in instruction writing, particularly in clarity and perhaps more breakdown of the task too.

The lecture on Thursday was good as we delved into form and the use of parameters to change the structure of the form to create new variations of it. It was useful to see some of the project boards that had been done previously to get an idea of the sort of thing we are going to be doing. I feel clearer about the idea of the form but nervous about the coding part of it. Hopefully after today’s tutorial I will feel less nervous. I also need to think about the type of form I want to start with, it’s tempting to go with a circle made up of lines maybe but perhaps something simpler would be better….