INSPIRATION
I was looking into patterns that occur in nature, because it’s fascinating how such complex patterns and structures form naturally. Things like nautilus shell, snowflakes, fractals in the ground, and butterfly wings. Going off my first two assignments, I want to continue to explore butterflies and make it generative, kind of like the teamLab exhibit. Since teamLab also uses 3D for their exhibits, I think it would be interesting to explore their concepts and designs.
Process
While I was inspired by the butterfly, I decided to explore my case study Journey and the particle system in that. There are moments in Journey where it seems like birds are generated and flying around the character. So I tried to recreate this effect using the cone geometry.
First, I replaced the cube with a cone just to make sure that it worked (because I learned previously not to start with something super complex). The main reference I used is the Flocking from the p5.js examples. This ended up being really difficult to implement into 3D. So I went back to my week 2 assignment and tried implementing that into 3D.
After many minor errors, I finally got the console to be error free. However, one major problem is that nothing was showing up even after the errors were gone. It seems that the functions work (I logged mousePressed), but the screen was blank with no cone in sight.
Like last time, I started debugging by removing all every function except the update(). Then, after a few trials, I decided to go back to the drawing board and start with the sample code provided then build on that. After running the code, I decided to try again step by step.
I went through my p5 code again, but instead of adding it all at once I did it line by line. Since the p5 code is in 2D, I had to make some adjustments in order to have it show on the screen. Additionally, this time I made sure that the object was indeed added to the array before adding the movements.
After including movement, it turned out like this:
This is completely different from what was going on in p5. It’s a lot crazier and moving a lot faster. Moreover, the repelling and attraction doesn’t work anymore.
Reflection
There’s still some other things I want to experiment with, but this is what I have so far. I definitely should have started earlier, since this is nowhere near complete, but I will keep experimenting going forward. It’s quite difficult trying to figure out the physics of these things, but I hope with time and constant practice I can improve.