p5.js
more p5.js
I spent most of a day this week watching p5.js videos by Daniel Shiffman on YouTube. He has long been a favourite coding author of mine, and I have two of his books: Learning Processing and The Nature of Code, which I backed on Kickstarter. His style of delivery isn’t as polished as those on the Introduction to Programming for the Visual Arts course on kadenze.com but I like Dan’s enthusiasm and energy. I was particularly keen to learn about OOPS in p5.js.
As a result of watching Dan’s videos, I now have a sketch for my maze project that generates blob objects at random intervals which then set off in their allocated direction.
My next steps are to:
- re-watch the section on loading images so I can pick and load a labyrinth path at random
- re-read the sections in my Processing books on basic trigonometry
- develop my findTarget() function, which is my attempt at a path-following algorithm
- upload my sketch to a server so I can have it running live on the web
My copy of Make: Getting Started with p5.js arrived in the post today, so there’s lots to keep me busy over the next week or two.
p5.js
I’m excited to have discovered p5.js, the recent implementation of Processing in JavaScript. Kadenze is currently running a free UCLA introductory course in it, which I’m enjoying. The prospect of using Processing in a browser environment is great. It would have made the interactive elements of the Erasure exhibition at The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery much easier. I haven’t signed up for the paid version of the course, so I have less direct access to tutors. Nonetheless, I’m looking forward to the sessions that cover the elements that p5.js can do that Processing can’t, though with the recent introduction of Processing 3 I’m slightly out of touch with its newest capabilities.
I still have the mandala project ticking away in the back of my head, and the possibility of achieving it online may be sufficient stimulus for me to make some real progress at last, but while writing this very paragraph, an e-mail arrived from Kadenze informing me of a new course starting on graphic illustration. I succumbed and am now enrolled. There was no session this week on the p5.js course so I thought ‘why not?’ Of course, there are lots of reasons why not, most of them listed on cards on my Trello boards, but it could be interesting and useful. There’s nothing to lose if it doesn’t work out as long as I keep focused on the other things I want to achieve.
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