Creative Coding, Project One, Blog One

For my first creative coding assignment I have firstly looked at a few possible forms I could use to manipulate. The three ideas I came up with were a triangle, circle and checker board. However I felt as if a triangle has limited possibilities in terms of manipulation, as you can see by my sketches below I have looked at breaking it apart, as well as curving the lines, which is fine but is about all I could do with it... The circle is much the same, here I have warped it, made it not a perfect circle... but that's about all I could do with it. Then there was the checker board which I had ideas of spreading the individual squares all over the place and manipulating their size and shape etc. but I felt that would have been a little boring.

I then looked at doing a star... however that is more or less just two triangles which again isn't very exciting. I did have a go at coding this however...

...this proved to me how visually unappealing it would be as well as limiting as there was not much to adapt.

I then looked at a Union Jack.

I thought this would be an interesting form to explore as it has many different layers to it due to the fact it is made up of a few different flags, meaning there is room to explore. 

As shown by the sketches above I'm looking at breaking apart and rearranging the layers of the Union Jack to see if it is still recognisable. I will also look at playing with size, making it bigger and smaller, and doing this to separate layers while the rest remain the same. I will also look at skewing sections of it etc.

As shown above I sketched up a Union Jack and jotted down the co-ordinates of each point for each line, then I used this to code it on processing. This was a long and tedious task.

After spending about two hours coding this I then came to realise that there really wasn't much I could do with this in the fact that I had used numbers in my coding with no variables, so in order to change anything I would have to go and change every individual co-ordinate which would be ridiculous...

...HOWEVER today I think this whole idea of coding clicked in my head and I think I get it now... Today when I re-coded it I used variables and actually looked at the relationships between different points etc. So now I can easily manipulate it by simply changing a variable. 

So far today I have managed to make the cross and plus symbol of my form, I also learnt how to create a shape out of the lines so I can fill the separate layers making it more visually appealing.

Here's what I've got so far...

This is the two shapes I made to day combined + the rectangle backdrop.

Here's the cross by itself, with backdrop

Here's the plus layer by itself, with backdrop

Here are some of my variables for my shapes,  it's my own little language

Here are my variables at work, representing the position of a co-ordinate in terms of another.

Here's an example of what I mean by easily being able to change variables to alter the form.