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Creating Procedural Artworks with Processing: A Holistic Guide PDF

480 Pages·2017·15.9 MB·English
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Creating Procedural Artworks with Processing A Holistic Guide By Penny de Byl This book is independently published by Penny and Daniel de Byl. While we've taken much pride in it's writing and code development we've bound to have missed the odd typo. If you find something a miss in your reading please let us know at [email protected] and we will add it to the errata list. Penny de Byl is a Professor of interactive multimedia and games at Bond University in Australia. An award-winning teacher, Penny has researched and taught computer science, computer graphics, game development and procedural art at top ranked universities for over 20 years. Copyright 2017 by Penny de Byl This book contains information obtained from authentic and highly considered sources. Every effort has been made to publish reliable information, however the author cannot assume responsibility for the validity of all materials or the consequences of their use. Except as permitted under Copyright Law, no part of this book may be reprinted, reproduced, transmitted, or utilised in any form by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying, microfilming, and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publishers. For permission to photocopy or use material electronically from this work, please contact Penny de Byl at holistic3d.com/contact. Visit the Holistic3d.com for ancillary materials and information relating to this text. (ver 1) Preface This book is written for those seeking to learn computer programming from basics to more advanced concepts. It uses the Processing language to visualise the concepts through the production of computer graphics that illustrate the coding principles while being artworks in their own right. This book started as a set of tutorials written for my university level multimedia students to introduce them to computer programming through the development of artworks. It’s therefore presented in a non-threatening way that will ease the reader into programming. In my opinion, Processing is the perfect language to start learning programming. It has a very simple interface, provides the programmer with sufficient power to explore all avenues of programming from algorithm development to computer graphics. The simple elegant interface allows those learning programming, from scratch, to focus on the programming without the need to learn a complex piece of software. Having said this, Processing is very powerful and used not only by novices but well seasoned computer artists to produce amazing works of art. Check out openprocessing.org if you don’t believe me. It’s also free – which is a bonus – and runs on both Windows and Mac computers. The structure of the code is not unlike C, C#, JavaScript and many others. I have always said and continue to say that once you’ve learnt one programming language it's easy to pick up and use another. All computers are constructed the same way and the most important thing you can learn about them, regardless of the language being used, is that they are logical machines that work through a series of on and off switches. Once you learn and master Boolean Algebra you will have a deep understand of what a computer is and how to communicate with it. Although technology is changing at break neck speed, very little changes with respect to programming. The knowledge that you acquire throughout this book will always be relevant and stand you in good stead throughout your life. How This Book is Organised This book has been written for absolute beginners who want to learn to program. It approaches coding through a unique combination of teaching programming while keeping in mind the principles of design and mathematics. All these elements are essential in a global economy filled with electronic interactive experiences and virtual reality. The chapters are organised to weave together programming functionality and design principles presenting one concept at a time: Chapter 1 To Know Thy Computer, explains why computers function the way they do. It presents the fundamental constructs of bits, bytes and binary, and demonstrates how computer memory is built and how it is manipulated through code. Chapter 2 Getting in Shape, examines all the visual components of art from points and lines through to complex shapes by presenting and demonstrating their mathematical basis and teaching the reader to draw these elements on the screen with code. Chapter 3 Elementary My Dear Watson, returns to the programming side of the content to take a deeper look at logic and demonstrates how it is one of the most important things a programmer should understand if they are to truly harness the power of the computer. Chapter 4 Colour My World, investigates colour by holistic means, examining its science, visuality and coding. Colour spaces will be discussed along with the methods for setting colours on the screen. More colour will be included in the Processing drawings by demonstrating how external images can be brought into the program and manipulated for interesting effects. Chapter 5 Power to the Programmer, introduces higher level programming concepts that show off the power of coding and demonstrates how with less lines of code the real power of computer processing can be exploited for repetitive tasks. In addition, the reader will learn how to write simple code to draw shapes that can be repetitively drawn and manipulated with small tweaks to create a plethora of images that through randomness never draws the same thing twice. Chapter 6 Transform My World, examines how the drawing canvas and shapes can be manipulated by moving, scaling and rotating. These concepts allow you to draw the same shape over and over again in different locations and ultimately assist you in creating live animated artworks. Transformations are a powerful concept and the foundation of creating fractals. Chapter 7 Curves, introduces the drawing and mathematics of curves. As not all objects in the world are constructed with straight lines, this chapter demonstrates how smooth continuous surfaces can be drawn to increase your drawing object palette to include natural structures such as leaves and flowers. Chapter 8 Fractals, presents the structure of nature and reveals the true beauty of mathematics. Through iteration of transformations and the drawing of shapes it will be revealed how complex geometrical shapes can be generated as well as natural objects that seemingly defy a fixed mathematical formula such as clouds, landscapes and plants. Chapter 9 Patterns, demonstrates how repetition can be applied to designs to form complex drawings that use the same shape or drawing over and over. Objects such as honeycomb and snowflakes will be examined and broken down into their elementary components to demonstrate how transformations and repetition can be used to construct larger repeating images. Chapter 10 Images and Text, introduces added functionality available in Processing for the reading in of external files to add interesting features to artworks such as images and text. The use of fonts and text will be explained and their use will feature in several projects including a practical example of producing ASCII art. 1. To Know Thy Computer By the end of this chapter you be able to: write and run a simple program in Processing; explain why numbers associated with computing come in powers of two; convert binary numbers into decimal numbers; define the terms bit and byte; demonstrate the differences between data types; perform arithmetic operations in a program; and, control the drawing canvas and create simple shapes.

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Creating Procedural Artworks with Processing – A Holistic Guide, is for those seeking to learn computer programming from the very basics to the more advanced concepts. It uses the Processing language (processing.org) to visualise the concepts through the production of computer graphics that illust
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Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.