Finished it, Like a Boss

Despite HPs best efforts and the time constraint I had I have finished my second interactive Processing application.

The way it works is that you click on the space and a series of ripples will expand and contract from the origin point of your click. You can have upto 4 points at any one time on the screen (on account of it starts to make the computer lag up something crazy). The additive effects of the circles start to make it look like a puddle on a rainy day, hence the dull grey background.

Admittedly its not all my own work. I mean I wrote it all -its all my own code- but I had ALOT of help from Mr Jose Sanches and his YouTube tutorials, and the Red Bull corporation of course.

Game On

Ok.

So I have like three days to create an interactive thing in Processing, this is a project we were given nearly a month and a half to do the first time around. Its going to take way too long to create the interaction I wanted before, hell I hadn't even entirely finished it when my laptop died. Ive decided to go very simple and create a sort of wave simulator (kinda).

So this is a quick example. Basically what I want to have is a bunch of rippling waves that interact with each other. Its crunch time and I'm gonna need alot of Red Bull.

HP Sucks

My PHP laptop died yesterday. Todays the day of the presentation and i have literally nothing to present because everything on my laptop (at least all of the important stuff) was wiped. It did a factory reset. Yay.

At least it tried to run a backup right? A for effort there HP. Too bad it just wasn't enough.

Yea, too bad.

BUT! My tutor and course co-ordinator were kind enough to give me an extension to next Friday. So here we go again...

Triangles to Circles

I realised very quickly that using triangles, and getting them to align how i want them to hen they collide is going to be very hard. Far beyond my skill level in Processing. Ive decided to change them to circles, which only need to grow bigger instead of rotate and join into each other ect.

Good news is Ive also gotten the objects bouncing through space aswell.

Learning Alot

This Jose guys tutorials are great, I've been learning everything from defining my own classes http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PP4_96YzBnM&list=UU5dMacit2C5fYiS4lMNq3ow&index=27&feature=plcp

to implementing arrays http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dj6UgZ9j2t8&list=UU5dMacit2C5fYiS4lMNq3ow&index=26&feature=plcp

this should get really cool.

Help has been found

Ive found a guy on youtube who does amazing tutorials, which are great for helping me with the holes in my knowledge http://www.youtube.com/user/jomasanrec?feature=results_main

He seems to have everything that ill need to get this project up and running.

Code Design

OK, here we go. This is the final design (the one il have at the interim), ive divided it into 11 different frames to show my point:

damnItCodeIHateYew

Well theres an interim presentation tomorrow, and due to a lack of time because of numerous other project due dates (three to be exact) Ive not done much actual CODE. I'm still trying to figure out objects which SUCK! and so in order to have something to actually PRESENT at the PRESENTATION ive had too whip up something extremely last minute, it shows my bouncing kinda but uses booleans and a circle instead of my cool non-existant objects.

Riveting stuff i know -_- .
(also notice the clever coding pun in the title? like no capitals except for new words? huh? huh? ah forget it)

Hard

Objects are linked to classes... I think. At least that's what the Processing .org website tutorials say.
Ive been doing these things for so long and I still cant bloody wrap my head around them. I swear me and coding are like when you go too another another country and try to charge your phone but cant because they use different power plugs than you. I just need to find the right adapter for my knowledge... so to speak.

What i'm trying to say is that learning about objects is really taxing my brain and free time, which are both valuable commodities.

My Objects

After chatting with Scott Brebner, who is waaaaaaaaaaaaaay too good at code (seriously, I think he  might secretly be a calculator) It came to light that a good way for me to make my triangles interact with each other and awesome stuff like that would be to classify them as objects. Turns out you can open up a new tab in processing for that kinda stuff. Cool.

Ive also decided to make some design changes (as far as colours go).  I was origonally going to have the background plain black, but its really over-powering. Ive decided to change it too a very dark grey intead which is a lot easier on the eyes.

Also the white trailing lines and circles I had in my storyboard look really cool so im going to implement them into the final design; having vapor trails behind the shapes and sort of chime things that go off whrn the shapes smack into each other/break apart. This should give them a much stronger sense of being physical objects rather than just digital triangles.

Storyboard Thing

Here's my Storyboard, pretty self explanatory.

Well, maybe not. The way it works is that ill have a bunch of red triangles in the center, all clustered up and when you click on them they will explode and travel around the plane, bouncing off the walls. When they eventually hit into each other they will stick and start moving allot slower, so that you can click on them and send them flying again.

In my diagram the white lines are used to suggest the movement of the triangles and the circles are places that they have connected/disconnected.

Chosing Colour

As far as colour schemes go Ive decoded to go for Black and Red. This is very similar to one of the schemes I nearly chose for the last project but found Black and Gold instead.

I like the colour combination of  Black and Red because it makes the Red stand out so much, much like the gold in the last project. The Red is the only colour and so has nothing to compete with for attention, it wonds up becoming extremely powerfull.

One thing i did notice was how the less Red you use, the more it stands out and grabs your attention.
Have a look at this one and compare it to those ^^^.

All Four: A Happy Family

This is my Final shot of all of my images, showing the decay of the structure from left to right. If you wana read about them just scroll down and you'll have ample words to read. That's what you wana read right? words?

NOISE!!

This is my final "noise" image. It is derivative of the older one that I made a few weeks back but I have tried to control the chaos (even though it is all nearly completely random) by cutting down specific amount of triangles of each size. There are twiny triangles of the two different sizes that i have adding to a total of 40 triangles. 20 of them have the potential to be 50 pixels away from their origins and 20 of them have the potential to be 100 pixels away.

I also did some ridiculous testing, this is probably the 20th image I have saved as a PDF and blown up in Photoshop only to scrap, its the cream of the crop.

Also (just a side note) I like how it kinda looks like shattered golden glass cascading to the ground.

Shaking up the Structure

These are the two images I have chosen to show my structure shaking apart:

For this first one I introduced a bunch or random variables into the co-ordinates of the triangles allowing them to warp within a certain boundary.

For this one I made the warping even more violent, allowing the variables to grow even larger. I also put a while loop in to introduce some smaller triangles at random points to make it look like the structure is starting to fracture off into multiple pieces.

You may notice I abandoned the the color changes. I found that it had the potential to deviate more than I would like so I decided to stay with one pure gold color.

Final "Structure"

This is my final "structure". It follows my precedents andis exactly what I wanted to acheive. To make noise from it I am going to try and essentially shake it apart.

Random Triangle Examples

These three images were made through the exact same means as the last image. The process is completely random so it can be repeated as many times as I want.

Development of Random Triangles

With this I added more triangles, I added another loop that will add 20 new triangles that have the potential to be even bigger than the last group. I also started messing with the colours, allowing them to randomize a little, the red can go up by 20 and the green and blue can become weaker, as i allowed them to go down by 10 each. All of the color changes are completely random

First Image

Its not much, but here it is, this is my first attempt at coding with black and gold triangles. I have just used while loops to generate a certain number of triangles at random positions on the field, their sizes are also random within a certain margin. If a do use something like this it will be for my noise image

Demonstration

This is something I made in paint, it took about 2 minutes but generally demonstrates what I want to make. I'm also going to experiment with different shades of gold and different shapes, but I want to stick to very basic geometric shapes like triangles and squares.