itp oddities

PERSONAL REFLECTION:

I have always had a fascination with the concept of our universe and outer space. I was very lucky that my family always encouraged my curiosity about the space that lies beyond our atmosphere both in a scientific and spiritual sense.

In my creative practice, the idea of the universe is inspiring because of the mystery and possibilities. It also re-ignited an interest in physics and quantum theory in my adulthood- there is just so much that we are only beginning to understand or explain and I find the forces that shape our world fascinating to think about.

I decided to have this sketch pay homage to what lies beyond and how our universe is ever-changing and in motion. Just like my relationship with code, there are things I understand and don’t, but am continually fascinated by it on my quest of continued learning.

｡✦˚ ݁˖‧｡.⊹☽˚.⋆.ೃ ｡˚

ASSIGNMENT // CREATE A SKETCH:

The assignment this week was to create a sketch that includes:

• One element controlled by the mouse
• One element that changes over time, independently of the mouse
• One element that is different every time you run the sketch

My project is called Planetary Alignment and includes rotation and orbiting objects moving over time independently of the mouse, stars that randomly generate, and a ‘slomo’ mode that is activated when the mouse is pressed down.

This one took a while to construct because I also wanted to incorporate WebGL even though this is not a concept we are going over in class. It was a lot of researching how to get things to do what I wanted them to do, testing out concepts, and seeing how different snippets of code interacted with each other.

Along the way I deactivated and moved some code so that my planet rotation and the star generation interacted together creating a happy accident that I absolutely fell in love with. ⋆.ೃ ｡˚

I actually like this better than my final project and is proof that sometimes the best things happen purely by accident and through the very scientific method known as ‘f*ck around and find out.’

One resource that I found particularly useful to help break down code and concepts in this assignment was ChatGPT.

It was helpful to ask it to explain functions or the use of various code in the project in a simple way and provided me with very basic code I could use to experiment with to understand concepts better. I think I will definitely use ChatGPT in the future as sort of a ‘coding tutor’ to help answer some of my basic questions so that I can go into class and help sessions with deeper questions.

｡✦˚ ݁˖‧｡.⊹☽˚.⋆.ೃ ｡˚

Here are the things I would love to incorporate in future iterations of this sketch:

• Decreased Speed in Star Generation
  The way I randomly generated stars is definitely not the best or most elegant way but it gets the job done! When I went into office hours I was told that once we dive more into arrays and booleans I could probably come up with a better way of not only generating the stars but also being able to control the rate at which they generate.
• Making Stars Glow
  I would love to be able to make the stars glow and possibly also generate them as 3D objects instead of flat circles in the space.
• Use of Unique Textures/Materials
  The planets both use ‘normalMaterial( )’ which essentially loads a place-holder material. In future iterations I would love to be able to import objects with unique skins and/or be able to import materials that could be used on shapes generated in the code.
• More Control over Lighting
  While I played with lighting a bit, this is something I would like to explore more, especially in regard to how it can influence the way a shape’s material appears in a scene.

Shout out to all the people who share their work with the world for the rest of us to admire and learn from! Here are some resources I found helpful throughout this process:

• p5.js Code References
  (used specifically the info on 3D/WebGL, frame rate, and orbit control)
• Random circle generator p5.js project by Kate3906 that helped with star generation code
• Intro to Computational Media help sessions to help answer outstanding questions I had
• ChatGPT
  (used specifically to help understand the code to create the orbiting planets, understanding the meaning behind the code in rows 15-19, and breaking down the orbit control function in simpler terms)

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