Archive for November, 2016

I’m pretty happy with how my final project turned out. We were asked to bring in a few generative animation examples to use as creative inspiration for our final project. I brought in this example, and it didn’t take long for us to crack the code of how it was accomplished in class. I took this resampled code and started working on expanding it’s premise which was pretty basic. Understanding classes and how to combine them with arrays was pivotal for developing this project.

Chris showed us how to detect image attachments in p5js by telling a particle to sense the image by color percentages. This opened up a new possibility to animate a ton of pixels and mask them until they sensed certain images that I preloaded in the sketch. Here are the 4 images I designed, each had a different class of particles interacting with them to create a multilayered effect:

By using variable speeds that were linked to perlin noise I was able to create some pretty fun effects. Perlin noise is very sensitive, so dialing in the right numbers took a very long time. There are 4000 total pixels at work in this animation so it gets a little bogged down, as they are constantly searching for the red to trace in the image examples I posted above. I’m happy with my progress in p5 for this quarter and am excited to keep digging into programming.

We started messing around with Arduino, a type of microprocessing kit that can be programmed to control devices. I’m pretty illiterate when it comes to electricity and how connections work, so this is a good opportunity for me to gain some basic knowledge of circuitry. We plugged a few things into our breadboards, made lights flash and then starting messing with a sliding potentiometer. This is where my interest is peaking, because I may be able to program a couple of knobs to interact with my final Sonic Arts animated projection. I’m pretty nervous about hooking this stuff up to my laptop, as we were warned a bad connection can fry your USB port.

I was provided a tutorial on how to connect p5js to a serial input, which is what I will need to do if I want to make my animation interactive. I really need to run through some more experiments with my SparkFun Kit to get comfortable with this stuff and still feel a little lost. We were provided a really nice introduction tutorial for the kit here.

Meanwhile, I have done a rough p5js sketch of my Sonic Arts projection, the only thing I’ve animated is some twinkling stars. The idea would be the blue ring would orbit around the planet and pulse to the music’s amplification levels. Ideally, users would be able to turn knobs and effect the color and intensity of the animation.