I have really fallen in love with Processing, but I had been had hit a bit of a plateau in terms of progress in the past month or so. I never really have spent too much time with algorithmic motion/drawing. When I jumped into Flash, I went straight towards the Tween class and never spent much time trying to work in the EnterFrame-loop based motion design. Because of this, learning how to work with Processing’s draw() loop has been a bit foreign and one can only find so many ways to implement sine/cosine motion treatments.
Luckily, I ran across the simply stunning work of Robert Hodgin who just happened to offer up his source code. After looking through one of his projects and banging away at it, I ended up learning a quite a bit on how motion can end up looking more organic and sporadic. This particular project used the noise() method as its basis for motion jittering. I had not even known such a method existed. After hacking up Robert’s source, I came up with some really interesting form experiments using Robert’s general motion concepts.
Meander Video
Below are three videos is a video made from the modified code from Robert Hodgin. Each has its own special characteristics in both motion and in form. The videos were captured at 1280×720 and re-encoded at their present dimensions. These videos use the H.264 codec which Adobe now supports in their current version of Flash Player. I am simply amazed at the increase in quality. Lastly, I am currently developing my own Actionscript 3 video player which I have chosen to use to display these videos. The player is still relatively early in development, so if you run into any trouble before/during/after playback, please let me know. Note, H.264 playback in Flash requires the 9.0.115 version of Flash Player. Make sure you are up to date.
Source Code
I was lucky enough to get a huge head start off of the kindness of someone offering up their source code. I thought it only fitting that I do the same. I hope it comes of use to any of you out there and if you end up improving upon it, make sure continue in the spirit and give it away to others.
The Discussion
4 Comments on “Processing Motion Experiment - Meander”mark
31.03.08 1:05 pmThanks for sharing this - The code and your insight. Would be nice to read more about your Processing work with code. I’m learning too and remain at a very elementary stage for the moment.
regards
mark
somerandomdude
31.03.08 2:59 pmIt’s my pleasure Mark, although I have to say that I can’t take much of the credit on this particular project. While I significantly modified the code for this particular event, most of the credit goes to Robert for his original work.
I will definitely be spending much more time in processing in the weeks/months to come and will be posting all my work and source code. I also just found out that Flash CS3 can now generate Quicktime movies from code-driven content (I can’t believe I missed this) so I will be using Flash in the same capacity (when it makes sense). Stay tuned…
Some Random Dude - Franklin Street » Blog Archive » Meaner 1
9.10.08 2:20 pm[...] More info at http://www.somerandomdude.net/blog/processing/meander/ [...]
Some Random Dude - Franklin Street » Meaner 1
10.10.08 3:31 pm[...] More info at http://www.somerandomdude.net/blog/processing/meander/ [...]
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