Flag Wave
I made an emergent pattern using rectangles, changing size and rotating to generate a flag-like wave texture inspired mostly by "magnetic wave" example.
produced by: Doruk Hasdogan
Introduction
This work is a short loop that, essentially has few rectangles changing rotation, scale, and position to generate a pattern that is aestheticly good.
Concept and background research
Starting from basic shapes was a great start point in my opinion, I looked into Zach Lieberman's works, ones we looked in the class, widnows screen savers and Saskia's pieces as well. Many of them having bits and codes that I don't understand, I feel like I was mostly inspired by the use of basic shapes on all of them. So I tried to do my own generative piece with basic shapes using what I learned.
After few failled itterations, I feel like I made something that looks good, and feels smooth. I built upon the magnetic grid I reverse engineered, and I feel like because of the wavy nature of the animation, it will look good on our accordion-like shape.
Technical
I had three itterations I did before I came to the last piece,
The first itteration I made was very similar to the magnetic grid, in fact I built upon it. I tied the scale of the objects to the sinus wave as well, and tweeked some values, but it looked really similar, so I discarded it, and thought it wouldn't fit in well with the shape.
The second itteration I used rectmode center, I made rotating shapes that fit in well with the background but I still thought it was week mostly concept wise.
For the final itteration, I used nested for loops to create the shapes on a grid. Used a float called shift to simulate the shift of the objects speeds, I made the basic changes inside the pushmatrix, rotation, scale, and position, giving it a movement. I tied the shift of the changes to shift of the sinus wave. I made each of the objects different color and varying values of sinus wave to create a pattern. As the rectmode center is not there anymore, it gives a solid direction where the flag is waving to.
Lastly I had an odd problem after leaving it on for around 2 minutes it kept crashing. By trial and error i found that resetting the shifts value was fixing it, maybe it was running out of digit space because it increases rapidly. So I used If statement to fix itself before it crashes.
Future development
There is a company called Reo-Tek called in Turkey, where I worked at, they made the most popular Turkish projection mapping app. They create example animations for the app as well, but they don't use openframeworks. For myself I can show, and maybe work on openframeworks to create some example pieces, and it could allways benefit me, if I plan to make some museum work. I feel like its a good start point, but it feels like a done piece, not much space to expand on. So for the future I can keep developing pieces like and better than this.
Self evaluation
I feel like the general animation works as a good loop, it is a small eye candy, but nothing more than that. I feel like I have done what I had on my mind starting on the project, an appealing generative piece, that is unique. So I feel like I wouldn't have done anything differently. My impression is that maybe the code was a little basic, when i shortened it, its only a few lines, but I am really new into coding. I feel there is a small place for improvement even though the work is really simple. I would love to give shapes some motion blur and glow, (at least to test out), but I couldn't figure it out.
Lastly when the sinus value is 0 all the pieces initially disappear, but changing that for some reason breaks the illusion of the waving flag, and for me I like seeing each bits of rectangle as it kind of reflects how the emergence happens.