P-P-P-Processing!

I originally wanted to make this an animation that continues to contort and convolute without a start/end point, but to make it loop perfectly and move at a reasonable speed would require it to be very long which would have made the file size enormous.

Made using the subtract color blend mode.

Dang, the file size of this was getting huge! Could only make it one loop long to keep it under the 15MB instagram limit. The GIF version of this was 16MB just for one loop! (FYI, GIF size limit on tumblr is 5MB) This is probably because a lot of pixels need to change colors every frame. Most of my animations have big shapes of color whereas this has a lot of little line detail. It also suffered quality loss upon turning into a MP4.

Another thing to note is that I think I accidentally matched up the frame rate with the frequency of the spiral so each blob looks like a solid object with curved lines on its surface rather than the spirals moving down the blob like in my previous spirograph animation. Oops!

For this animation, I generated a random, hatched background, and then mask it out. The mask shapes are made using simplex noise. Specifically I used an implementation of simplex noise by Kurt Spencer called Open Simplex Noise found here: https://gist.github.com/KdotJPG/b1270127455a94ac5d19

I used this external noise generator because the Perlin Noise generator built into Processing only goes up to 3 dimensions, but I needed 4: width, height, and then two extra dimensions to travel through time in a circular motion. If I wasn’t trying to make a looping animation, I could have done with only 3 dimensions as I wouldn’t have needed an extra dimension to loop back, i.e. my motion through time would have been a 1-dimensional line rather than a 2-dimensional circle.

Also, simplex noise is supposedly cleaner (fewer directional artifacts) and faster than Perlin Noise.

That being said, this animation took longer than usual to to render. In most of my animations, each frame is usually generated and then saved in maybe 0.25 of a second. But while rendering this one, each frame takes about 5 seconds to generate and save. There are several factors that I think play into this. First, I’m using a lot of off screen PGraphics renderers to create images and masks which I’ve noticed slow down a program. I guess using them and creating them is CPU intensive. Second, using 4D noise is inherently slower than calculating noise in lower dimensions.

In the code for this animation, each box travels further than where they disappear, but it’s coded so that a box only gets drawn if it appears between two virtual clipping planes (one where they appear and one where they disappear).

This was made in 3D with an orthographic projection so that all the boxes are nice a square with each other and aren’t scaled due to distance.

First time using something from a previous animation in a new way! That’s the exciting part about making all these things that use different kinds of mathematics, you get to use them again in new ways.

Also, this is the first time I’m using instagram to post here. Since the animation is so long, the gif size is too large for Tumblr. So instead, I’m posting an mp4 to instagram, then posting it here. But instagram is silly because I can only post from my phone. So I have to transfer mp4s to my phone first which is just a tedious extra step.

I was originally going to make it look closer to the flag; flag proportions rather than square, offset ‘C’, and no angle to it. But I got lazy and the angle was an accident I ended up liking.

I could have used more samples to make the squiggles smoother and more circular, but I decided I like how angular it is.

Made using an image mask. Two images are created: One of the lines and one of a spinning cube. The image of the cube is then used as a mask to only show the parts of the image with the lines that fall within the 2D projection of the cube.

The name is definitely Starfox inspired.

200 frames, 25fps

My second 3D animation!

The orbiting sphere that’s black with a white border is actually a small black sphere closer to the foreground and a white bigger sphere behind it. That was the only solution I could figure out to create that “cel shaded” style. I could have just drawn a 2D ellipse, but since the orbiting planets move through 3D space, the orbit circle would have intersected through the circle.

Learned how to implement spherical geometry on this one! Thanks for the tutorial Daniel Shiffman! Also, this is my first time taking a foray into 3D animations.

Another riff on the tentacle arm guys I’ve been making. This was directly inspired by the strange creature at the end of this old Tokyo Plastic animation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jajQy8sbELc

I love the way the tentacles are so wispy!

One issue you can see in my animation is that when the slugula slows down to turn around, you can see that that ends of the tentacles pause briefly. I’d say it does that because this is a flat (that is 2D) animation. If I remade this in 3D, when the slugula “pauses”, it would really be coming towards you and so would keep pulling on the ends of the tentacles. I’ll get to it someday. I’ve mostly only really done 2D animation, I’ve only briefly experimented with 3D in Processing.

Yes, slugula is following a Lissajous curve path.

This is just a riff of my “Reach” animation. Rather than being made up of a few discrete circles, the arms in this animation are made of 150 overlapping circles, giving the illusion of being solid arms. Presumably this animation also has the same issue of not being a “true” perfect loop as I wrote about in my “Reach” animation.