Processing was a really fun program to play with. With the use of simple code you can make just about anything you can imagine and design it so that you can interact with it.


After our opening session with processing, we created just a few basic shapes and learnt how to animate them to bounce around the screen or let us draw pictures. We were then told to think of our own ideas and spark up something creative.


I unfortunately did most of my work on my laptop and lost my original work due to hard-drive failure. As it's almost December and I recently took a trip through the Cabot Circus christmas market, I decided to go with a festive design for my next attempt.


I created a snowman standing in a field and spent some time animating snow around him to really fake him feel festive. I have included a video of the code and the snowman in action below.

float[] Xcoord = new float[500];
float[] Ycoord = new float[500];
float[] Xmove = new float[500];
float[] Ymove = new float[500];

void setup() {
size (1300, 650);
smooth();
for (int i = 0; i < 500; i++) {
Xcoord[i] = random(width);
Ycoord[i] = random(height);
Ymove[i] = random(2, 5);
}
}

void draw() {
fill(0);
rect(-1, -1, width + 1, height + 1);
fill (0,100,0);
rect (0,550,10000,150);
fill (250,250,250);
ellipse (600,480,160,180); //Body
ellipse (600,345,120,120); // Head
fill (102,178,255);
ellipse (620,332,20,20); //Eyes
ellipse (580,332,20,20);
fill (0,0,0);
ellipse (620+mouseX/120,332+mouseY/120,5,5);
ellipse (580+mouseX/120,332+mouseY/120,5,5); //eyes

fill (255,128,0);
ellipse (600,360,20,20); //nose
fill(255);
for (int i = 0; i < 500; i++) {
ellipse(Xcoord[i], Ycoord[i], 5, 5);
Xcoord[i] +=Xmove[i];
Ycoord[i] +=Ymove[i];

//make it wiggle!!
Xcoord[i] += random(-5, 1);

if (Ycoord[i] > height) {
Ycoord[i] = 0;
}
if (Xcoord[i] < 0) {
Xcoord[i] = width;




}
}
}

My Code

What went well?

What didn't go well?

I'm happy with my finished product



The snow physics work very well and look awesome



The eyes follow the cursor to some extent

Lost original work and new one is not as good in comparison


Rushed due to time constraints



Eyes do not work completely as intended

Frustratingly I feel like the biggest thing I have learned from this particular part of my project, is that keeping backups of every single important file is crucial to achieving your best.

I really like the finished product, it feels christmassy and the snow looks very good. The snowman is very basic but I feel he serves his purpose well and looks good in the scene.

I should have been more prepared and put more time into this aspect of the project, but I really enjoyed using Processing and look forward to doing more work with it in the future now that I have a better understanding of it.