My thesis, ‘Missing Mysticeti’,is an abstract animation and designed to be displayed on 4 wall-sized screens in a room.
Nature Of Code played the key role of creating visuals of this project.
Especially, ‘Screen 2’ and ‘Screen 4’ are processing sketches, whereas ‘Screen 1’ and ‘Screen 3’ are movie files animated and rendered in After Effect with the imported movies which had been created with and exported from processing.
Let me get into details.
‘Screen 2’ is based on Box2D library. All started from ‘Blobby’ by Daniel Shiffman. First, First, I put particles inside one blob and didn’t meet any problem. However, I got in trouble, collision problem, when I created more blobs with particles. I began with 4 blobs having their own objects in them and placed them in two layers. That means, the blobs in the same layer should collide with each other but should not collide with the blobs in the other layer. I solved this problem with ‘filtering’ functions of the library, ‘groupIndex’, ‘categoryBits’ and ‘maskBits’.
Second, I tried to give texture to one blob. To use ‘texture’ function, I changed the world from 2D to 3D. In this stage, ‘Surface tension’ had to be considered to recover the original shape of blobs after colliding with other objects and boundaries. I created one center body and made it connected with the centers of skeletons of blobs.
The third, after finishing the basic animation, I made ‘Screen 2’ communicate with Pure Data by OSC(Open Sound Control). I intended to make blobs enter the screen from the bottom when they would get the message from Pd. And after enter the screen, they should move about and collide with others. I, first, removed the bottom boundary and set the gravity of the world ‘0’. Changing ‘applyForce’, blobs moved up first and then moved randomly after entering the screen and reach around center of screen. The important thing was adding boundaries for each blobs in order to prevent blobs go out through the bottom of screen again.
Finally, I made particles in two blobs created according to the incoming message of corresponding sound from Pd.
(You can see animations by click on images below)
‘Screen 4’ started from ‘springs’ in Processing site and I added the flower which was created based on the ‘Oscillation’ by Daniel Shiffman.
'Screen 1' is the movie file which is animated and rendered with 3 processing animations with After Effect.
