I had not heard of John Whitney prior to this assignment. Seeing his work was really inspiring, and hearing about how his concept was all about finding the moment in seeming chaos that everything lines up is utterly fascinating. I feel like I try to do that all the time in the real world, so when I saw it in computer generated art I was hooked. This was a difficult assignment though in that it kept ending up as a dot that moved around slowly in the center of the screen. Getting the dots to spread out and then move in a certain momentum was really difficult. The great part of this was that once you really get them going, you can really see something amazing happen.
I chose to do a tornado because I thought that would be an interesting natural phenomenon to mimic. I wanted to do more with it, like give it a bend in its funnel and make the top part and the bottom part move around each other, kind of how they do in real life, but that was a lot more than I knew how to do. Its actually only half of what is actually being rendered. The other half is below the cut off for the screen.
This one is pretty explanatory. Sin and cos used to make the squares look like they are jumping around, while they are listening to "Jump Around". There isn't anything super difficult or unique in the code, but I do love the little ones that are jumping around in the background. Also, there is a total unintentional John Whitney moment at parts where they all jump at the exact same time. High five!
I started to play with the rotate on x, y, and z axis with a simple rectangle. When I set it to increment on the update it really started to look like it was flapping. I started to really toy with each of these vectors by adding in the sin and cos function. It was all over the place at first, but then it started to be more and more refined until it really looked like it was flapping. Then I mad a second wing. Easier than it sounds. I had to basically start from scratch since the vectors were almost completely opposite. Once I got the two of them flapping I tried to make it so that they would follow the mouse x and y. I used the distance from the xeno and the mouse position to affect its rotation as well. It really looked like it was flying to the mouse location. There were still some minor flaws in it at this point, especially the fact that when it crossed the mouse location, it bugged out. Also, if you were above or below the xeno, it rotated down/upwards (depending) until it looked flat, like an open book. Ramsey helped me to constrain it so that wouldn't be able to do that. It had a lot to do with figuring the place on a circle that the butterfly can rotate to in relation to the mouse. Once it was all done, it really looked like it was flying around the screen!