15104 & 60212 • COMPUTATION for CREATIVE PRACTICES
Professors Roger Dannenberg & Golan Levin • Fall 2015
When asked to plan a generative moving landscape, I immediately thought of the game, Journey. This is a visually stunning, emotionally oriented game where you, a cloaked wanderer fly through a landscape of sand dunes, old buildings, ruins and caves.
I tried to refer to the color scheme and the my favorite structures, the posts, in this sketch. I used noise functions to render the scenery. I used a random function for the color of the posts to create a dust-wind effect.
With this project I wanted to do a perspective view, as if you were moving through 3D space; walking on a pathway with trees on either side towards the horizon. Granted, this is a cartooned and exaggerated perspective, it was a challenge animating three sets of objects. In the end I couldn’t figure out how to animate the third set and since the console was returning “cannot read property of ‘move’ of undefined,” I’d assume that there was something weird going on with my move and display functions within Pathway.
Upon reflection-after waking up: Wow. I never thought I would bomb a project so badly. Objects had seemed simple, but after trying to add it in to my code, the original would’t run either. I will work on better time management skills. As for the latest attempt, this is what the code looks like. Most of the object stuff is commented out because they don’t work….I will redeem myself with an epic project next next week.
Last night before 12:
(NOOOOOO!!! I really wanted to make this super cool-I spent too much time manipulating the landscape that I did;t have time to add in my objects!!! NOOOO!!! I’ll still post another one the finished version in an hour, but I can’t be late so………)
Last night a few minutes after 12: (DAMMMN. THIS IS MY 5TH UPDATE SINCE MIDNIGHT, AND I STILL CAN’T SEE MY PROGRAM RUNNING ON THE BLOG. I’M SO CONFUSED. AAAAAAAAGH!!!! HAVE MERCY! I DIDN’T SLEEP THE TWO NIGHTS BEFORE! WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY…..I kind of want to cry.)
Here’s another update. This was the plan B…
I had originally taken the 06 assignment and changed it for the background of my project…..so my 06 assignment actually looks better than the current state of my project. (For some reason I can’t see my embedded js when I preview this blog-I’m worried nothing is showing up)
sketch
My project is a cup of coffee with rising steam as the “landscape”. The user clicks to reduce the size of the steam and cool down the coffee. When the coffee is cool (no steam), the user is ready to “drink” the coffee, and “refill” for another cup.
Click for camera filters!
Let me start out by saying I know it’s way under what we were supposed to have for this project. What I have looks cool in my opinion but when I tried to go further the loop stopped. Between the time pressure of my other classes and the deadline even with the late day… I just mentally couldn’t go through with it and went back to the basic code. I know it’s not an excuse but I had high goals for it and didn’t accomplish it. I’m sorry.
sketch
This weeks assignment of creating a generative landscape was the most tricky yet fulfilling assignment yet. When deciding what to create, I began to delve into the different types of landscapes I’ve seen and which my favorite have been. In the end I came to the conclusion that my favorite had to be that of the cloudscapes seen while flying. I specifically based my cloudscape after that of the usual view I see when flying home to Los Angeles and thus had the opportunity to play with fun things such as colors of the sky, clouds, and interesting sneak peaks of the top tips of things like palm trees and mountains. Using some of the more recent tools we’ve learned in javascript such as noise and biased randomness allowed me to achieve more interesting aspects of watching this scene and allowed the piece to become much more dynamic.
For this project, I wanted to make a landscape with cars passing by. I used the noise function to create mountains and clouds in the background and added cars passing through at different speeds. There are small cars of changing colors farther away and larger yellow ones in the foreground that come through at a more infrequent rate.