fun with processing spinning ellipses

Processing is intended to be a "creative coding" tool for non-programmers. It runs on top of Java, which is good enough to get started. The performance-anxious folks might eventually prefer something like Cinder, which has C++ libraries instead.

I tweaked a simple snippet from a tutorial as a first step:

java

void setup() {

  size(600, 600);

  background(255);

  smooth();

  translate(300, 300);

  for (float i = 0; i < 360; i+= 0.3) {

    pushMatrix();

      rotate(radians(i));

      translate(0, 300);

      rotate(radians(i * 10));

      scale(map(sin(radians(i * 6)), -1, 1, .5, 1),

        map(sin(radians(i * 3)), -1, 1, .5, 1));

      drawEllipse();

    popMatrix();

  }

}



void drawEllipse() {

  noFill();

  stroke(255, 0, 0, 128);

  ellipse(0, 0, 600, 100);

}

and got some funky looking images.

{% img center http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3776/1216239944314fd4eea37z_d.jpg %}

{% img center http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7423/121621607055bc891cfa6z_d.jpg %}

{% img center http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7341/12162577004ee1689e71fz_d.jpg %}

{% img center http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3742/12162819596176dc1a9d3z_d.jpg %}

{% img center http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5513/1216257486410b7b887f3z_d.jpg %}

Before you say meh, none of this is supposed to make you Michaelangelo. But it provides a kind of instant-gratification, since you can tweak your sketch, run it, tweak it again, run it again, and so on ... which is rather hard to come by.

Tags: old-post

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