Author: xl2149

For this project, I made a small project about the “mouse/cursor key”. When I was small, I liked to change the cursor key into different shape and size and I found it quite fun. And sometimes there will be trace when moving it. So I made an interactive key that one can adjust its size and choose to leave a trace or not.

  

Basically one can use up and down keys to change its size, and when mouse pressing there will be trace. The main function I used is the mouseIsPressed that could capture the mouse down events.

Project Name: Finally, they became stars

Course: Nature of Code

Professor: Moon

Project Presentation:

Introduction

There is a saying that “When people pass away, they become stars in the sky”, which I found really beautiful when I was a child. So I visualized this process based on the fact that “In average, about 1.8 people pass away every second”. So, in the project, every second about two starts will go up into the beautiful auroral night sky from ground, indicating that there are two men leaving us but heading to a new world.

Motivations

I have been hearing the saying when I was at very young age, and I really like this telling. Death is happening every second, it truly is a terrifying things, some people want to avoid it while some people are waiting for it. What’s death truly is? It’s too complicated and we will never have the answer. And that’s why this saying is so attractive and beautiful, it’s simple, peaceful, and it makes us forget about the pain.

Inspiration 

For Aurora, I looked into the real Aurora in our world and so do stars and mountains. And for souls, I found the shape of Lanterns, especially the Chinese Kongming Lantern is quite inspiring and pretty, so I decided to use this form to present souls.

Building Process

I used P5 (Java Script) to build my project, and every elements of the project is generated by code rather than any images. Here are some techniques for each element:

Aurora

Aurora is generated mainly by the function noise. The basic technique is that each particle has a Xcurr = Xpre + 1 value, and Y value is created with noise value plus a sin value so there is a wave effect, randomly but also consistently.  And for the color, I used Screen blend mode so that it would be more similar to real Aurora.

Background Sky

The sky is also generated by noise value, and you can see the change of the color from dark to light is not even, which is more natural. Basically there are thousands of 4*4 rectangles arranged in the background, and they have different color to each other, making it possible for color change.

Lantern / soul

This is the soul that goes from ground to the sky. Cause it represents the human soul, I want to make it pretty and thus be respectful for lives. It is made by three nested classes, and each has its own function.

As shown in the image, class Particle is responsible for basic movement of each ellipse, and then class pSystem has an array to store all these ellipse object, and make it a whole. Then class Lantern has an array to store each particle system, make it possible to move together from ground to sky, and then finally disappear(splice). Why disappear? Because p5 is only capable for about 20 Lantern class objects exist at the same time, so I have to splice them regularly to maintain my frameCount.

I changed the color to make it fit into the background, and changed its size to very small. I wish it to be a little bit bigger but it seems to lose frameCount in this way too.

Stars

( The above image is quite unclear)

The stars are relatively simple, but it’s also quite important for the screen. Basically there is star class and each star is a particle whose transparency keeps change through Sin value. Also, the whole class is rotating around point(width/2,0), which shows a effect of time change, and makes the frame more dynamic.

Difficulties

1. The coordinates of the star, Aurora, and the souls.
   At first, I was worried that these three things will be quite messy, cause they are all moving and they might collide with each other. So I searched a lot of the pictures of real Aurora night sky with stars and try to adjust the colors of the aurora, souls and the background, finally I found one combination could work out, although not completely satisfying, it’s not messy at least.
2. Lose frameCount
   Because the stars, souls and aurora are moving and the same time, the frameCount is quite low and it’s not as smoothy as expected, the only solution is to use less elements with small size and low speed.

Reflection

In all, it’s quite fun making this project cause each part is very pretty thus gives me a sense of accomplishment. And I have learnt to make my code structure much cleaner this time so I could easily make adjustment to my project. As professor said, we should make things step by step, part by part, and I found that really useful especially when my projects are composed of several parts. I could make each part work and then group them together, which saves a lot of time.

For my homework 10, I mainly used a seek function to have my little yellow man move towards my mouse when I clicked. As is showed in the video:

VideoOfHw10

 

When pressed

By using the seek function, my little yellow men will seek for the position of the mouse, and they will gather around with it. To avoid static gathering, I add a random factor to their positions, to make them more dynamic.

I also tried flow field, but it didn’t work out as well as I expected, and here is the video:

hw101

Video： The Demo

Recently, the first photo of a black hole is “taken”, and finally we got to have a glimpse of this mysterious physical phenomenon. And I am fascinated by it, so this time I made a mini black hole.

It’s relatively simple, basically is using what we have learnt in class. For the outside “light” part, I created four objects of class Psystem, and for the inside dark part, I also created an object of that class, but when I run them, there is a small difference:

 

The parameter in run() function is the acceleration of the particle class. For the dark particles, I chose a very small acceleration so they may not escape from the center before they extinguish, which makes it look more like a circle inside, but dynamic.

Very Different from the real black hole, mine is continuing giving thins out, which is obviously against the physics’ law.  But right now I am  only able to write diffusion effect rather than contraction. 🙂