The futurelearn Creative Coding extravaganza continues – so this week featured a heavy focus on Processing. I dove into 3d graphics (a little before we were supposed to) and had lots of fun – and frustration – with various aspects of 3d design in processing. Observations:

-Proccessing’s GPU utilization isn’t all that amazing – or maybe I’m missing something with how I’m utilizing it. There’s something very unintuitive about how you have to redraw every frame instead of having ‘physical objects’ you can move around.

-So far, basic trig is by far the hardest subject to truly “get” (a frustration that’s been shared by many of my peers at the group). Somebody told me about this lovely Processing trig primer that really made life easier – but it’s still a hard concept to grasp. Trig is, of course, crucial because it’s all about the connection between radians and degrees – circling the square, etc. Good command of (the basics of) trig is a must-have for any serious computer graphic work. It’s really not that hard, once you get the hang of the unit circle model.

So yeah, there’s are just little etudes, nothing too ambitious – but nevertheless, all coded from scratch (which, I’m learning, is the real measure of whether you’ve learned anything at all; anybody can play and tweak and example. Show me someone opening a blank sketch and I’ll show you a true Processor, or, er, whatever we’re called.

Moar Processing next week, probably! Till then!