One of my many goals this year has been to learn more about scripting and procedurally generating graphics, for which I’ve been using the language Processing. I don’t have a lot of prior experience with code, though, and that makes things a bit difficult!
It’s a totally different way of thinking. Processes that seem simple enough to me—like drawing a series of city blocks that are different shapes but all have the same width streets between them, for instance—are surprisingly difficult to put into code. And at the same time, graphics that would be difficult or just tiresome for me to execute physically, like filling the screen with parallel lines or drawing the same shape over and over in different places, are particularly simple.
Much of the learning curve has just been differentiating between the different parts of code and learning their names so I can understand instruction, even before I learn the actual functions.
That all said, I’ve been having a pretty good time coming up with little visual programs. Below are some short animations that I’ve made so far. I’m particularly proud of the fact that I came up with and wrote all the code for each one myself. It’s possible to copy others’ code, but I find that that often causes more problems than it solves—and it’s more satisfying to know I coded something from scratch.