Week 3 Assignment

Concept

While looking through the examples that we went over class, I was reminded of how planets orbit in the space, which has always been something I was interested in. So I thought it’d be fun to trace the lines of the orbit without showing the actual attractor (in this case this would be the planet), so that they will look almost like flowers that bloomed in space. I got inspired by the Korean traditional flower patterns, which is shown below, and wanted to recreate something similar to it but in a much simpler outline and with a space background.

Process/Highlight

Taking professor Aya’s advice, I first made sure to watch these two tutorials (1, 2) from the Coding Train before beginning my project, during which I learned a few core rules such as:

• establishing universal gravitational constant (written as G in the code), which is a property of attractor itself. It’s a way to tune the world to have  stronger/weaker gravitational attraction forces.
• you need direction (vector, use sub() function) and magnitude when calculating the force.

Keeping these information in mind, the vision that I had was creating a total of 3-5 different flower patterns that were different in sizes, so I created a total of 3 individual attractors and movers and varied elements such as ellipse and this.vel.mult(); for each attractor and mover. I also varied the colors for each of them in order to make the canvas more vibrant.

Something that I had trouble with for a while was adjusting/movign the position of the mover3, but after trying out various combinations of numbers, I realized that I needed to edit this part of the code in order to move the position of the mover:

  show() {
    stroke(255,100); 
    strokeWeight(2);
    fill(255, 20);//adjust color
    ellipse(this.pos.x / 0.63, this.pos.y / 0.63, this.r * 2);
  }
}

And as for the attractor3, I also adjusted this part below in order to move its location:

  show() {
    noStroke();
    fill(255, 0, 100);
    ellipse(this.pos.x * 1.6, this.pos.y * 1.6, this.r * 2);
  }
}

Then I just hid all the attractor.show(); functions in order to make them invisible, and changed the colors and transparency of each mover and added a background image. I also added Daniel’s particle code so that it will act like stars in the background. I tried running it multiple times for variation, and I got 3-4 different versions.

Here’s the final sketch.

Reflection

Some possible rooms for improvement are:

• setting the sketch so that it will stop drawing once it hits a certain number of repetition so that the movers’ traces won’t look so clumped together in the end.
• limiting the freedom of randomized designs (sometimes the movers were moving in an unruly way so the pattern looked a little off).

I also couldn’t figure out how to add turbulance/resistance with the particles, because my original idea was to have the particles repel away from the movers. This is also something I’d like to work on next time.