Transformation

The next project for this paper is called Transformation.  It has to do with creating and interactive processing sketch with visuals and sound that reacts to the movement of the mouse across the window.  During the weekend I did some research on Open Processing and found a few sketches which I thought were kind of neat.  The first was a code which caused a little figure at the bottom of the screen to chase after your mouse pointer.  When the pointer was directly above his head he would jump at the pointer and try and grab it.  If the figure managed to touch the pointer it would grab the pointer and run off screen with effectively stealing it.



Something I only noticed after embedding it is that the figure also has extendable arms if it rests long enough under the cursor.

Another sketch that I liked was of a ball of fur that could have its hair manipulated with the cursor. I thought it was cool the way its eyes follow the mouse and how the hair moves according to its movement.



After some more research I will post up my first ideas for the second project which i have a presentation for this Friday.

Reflections

This post is about what I learned during my first project for DSDN142.

I learnt that to keep on top of my blog and to make it accurate I have to blog things very soon after they happen.

I also learnt that to use my time efficiently I should read the brief before starting the project and doing the wrong thing and wasting time.

I found that the tutors are a great source of information and inspiration on design direction and coding problems.

In my next project I want to extend my design skills and plan more interesting designs.

PDF's for Hand In

Just went had a look at the hand in criteria for the project and found that I also had to post PDF of the sketches for hand in. Here they are.

Bubbles
Rain
Waves
Shore

Final Day

Today is hand in day and all I need to do is to do is print off my last sketch and post the sketches online so here they are.








The shore wallpaper was going to be the waterfall wallpaper, but I decided that the set needed another pattern like the waves to balance out the set, with two close pattern based panels(the waves and the shore) and two with more distance and less repetitive panels( the bubbles and the rain).

Weekend Stuff

During the weekend I spent a lot of time finishing my sketches and managed to come up with four sketches. One represents the rain, another the waves, another bubbles and the final one which I have not completed yet represents waterfalls.

I decided to change the waves pattern so that the pattern was larger as it balanced better with the other two sketches that I have finished better.

I also decided to get rid of the shiny spot on the bubbles as it looked to detailed compare with the other too and also was too literal.

Tomorrow I plan to print off the first three sketches and finish my last one by tuesday morning. Also I have to buy a USB drive to get the sketches printed off.

I wil post the sketches up when I have completed the set.

Friday Studio

In fridays studio after making my first attempt at the panel that represent waves, I decided that to bring the panels together form wise i would only use circles and arcs to make the patterns. After this I attempted generate a bubble pattern but struggled with placing the bubbles using loops and having their height change the further up the frame they got.

Here are the two sketches so far.




I also had a struggle with the waves sketch as it would not render in open processing at the size I had the frame at, but managed to fix it buy making the frame smaller. Because of this I decided to write the sketches so that the size could be changed while keeping the proportions of the image the same.

After the Presentation

After the presentation on Tuesday my design has changed. This is due to my ideas being to literal as the project requires that the panels be an abstracted pattern rather than a picture. Also the ideas that I had made would be hard to reproduce using Processing.

After talking to my tutors, they suggested that I either take certain parts of my sketches and use them to make a pattern or focus on one of the elements and create patterns from there. They suggested if I did the latter to either choose the earth or water sketches as a basis, which I wholly agree with.

After taking into consideration the things my tutors had told me at the presentation I went home and thought about it and decided to go with the water panel as my main theme and take parts of it such as the bubbles and the waves and make a set based around features of water.

I have done a few rough sketches but nothing good enough to post, as it is covered in writing.

Ideas for the Wallpaper Project

I started to think about my ideas for the project and really liked the idea of producing a set of images based on the four primal elements of fire, water, earth and air. So I searched google for some inspiration for my panels and came up with two images that I used to sketch the earth and water panels.

This is the image for the earth panel I used for inspiration. I really liked the pattern the cracks in the dried mud made and copied it to my sketches.

This is the image the inspired my water panel. I liked the way the water look at the surface from underneath and how the bubbles got flatter the closer to the surface they got. I also liked the gradient of the plain space.

For air I looked out the window at the mainly clear sky and notice the gradient and put that in the panel. I also added clouds as the panel was looking quite plain.

For the fire panel I drew from experience and drew a fire along the bottom of the panel made up almost entirely out of squiggly lines.

These are my sketches laid out in the way they would be if placed on the doors the wallpapers were being made for. I presented these to the class as part of my assignment on Tuesday which i will talk about in my next post.

First Post & First Sketches!!!

YAY!!! This is my first blog post for my DSDN 142 course at Victoria University of Wellington.  Posted below are my first attempts with processing to make patterns that are intresting using Ben Jacks pattern_maker code.  They code can be found Open Processing.

This is my first sketch which was based of some drawings we did in the first DSDN142 lecture.



This is my second sketch which I played with stroke weight and colour.



This sketch is my attempt at making a tartan like pattern. I had a better understanding of how stroke weight worked and was able to produce a better pattern than before.



This is the final sketch from my first week of Creative Coding. I experimented with the random function of processing with the line weights and with transparency. I do not like this one as much as the third sketch but it still has its merits.