Category: ITP – Nature of Code – Physics-Animation

The Nature of Code – Physics / Animation final

We start with one star made in photoshop with the feather tool:

I wrote the sketch in processing. There is a class for the stars, which loads the star image above 500 times at random places on the canvas, of random sizes and random brightness’s for every draw loop. The stars are attracted to 500 invisible black holes. The attraction physics are based on the forces chapter in The Nature of Code. If you move the mouse to the left in the sketch, you can “disappear” the stars one at a time.

Huge thank you to fellow ITP student Aarón Montoya-Moraga for trying his best to teach me calculus for force vectors. Yikes!

We decided it would be fun to project the star field onto the ceiling in my apartment with two projectors.

 

Here is the projects code on github!

https://github.com/aaronparsekian/project_constellation/tree/master/constellation

 

Nature of Code – physics and animation project

for my final project I would like to go in an extraterrestrial direction . . . .

I will be using a particle system to create an interactive planetarium that I can project onto a ceiling. My basic idea is to have points on a night sky that:

  • move slowly in a relative plane
  • are grouped into organic clusters
  • are of multiple size
  • twinkle or some variety of brightness
  • have some fun user interaction that effects either a portion of the particles, or maybe all of them?

During a recent NYU dumpster diving trip, I came across two 6500lumen christie projectors. I think this will be a fun way to use them! I am lucky to have 14′ high ceilings in my apartment, so my ceiling will be a perfect place to project some star fields.

Someone crazy threw these massive projectors out!

For the user input, I would like to keep it simple. Something about a big trackball seems planetary 🙂

Some of the Nature of Code examples I would like to take advantage of are:

  • Attraction forces
  • Particle Systems
  • Motion acceleration forces
  • Fluid resistance?
  • Magnetism?