Book Image

Mastering openFrameworks: Creative Coding Demystified

By : Denis Perevalov
Book Image

Mastering openFrameworks: Creative Coding Demystified

By: Denis Perevalov

Overview of this book

openFrameworks is a powerful programming toolkit and library designed to assist the creative process through simplicity and intuitiveness. It's a very handy software library written in C++ to reduce the software development process, helping you to kick-start creative coding. With the help of C++ and shaders support, openFrameworks allows for the processing of all kinds of media information with your custom-developed algorithms at the lowest possible level, with the fastest speed. "Mastering openFrameworks: Creative Coding Demystified" will introduce you to a world of creative coding projects, including interactive installations, audio-visual, and sound art projects. You will learn how to make your own projects using openFrameworks. This book focuses on low-level data processing, which allows you to create really unique and cutting-edge installations and projects. "Mastering openFrameworks: Creative Coding Demystified" provides a complete introduction to openFrameworks, including installation, core capabilities, and addons. Advanced topics like shaders, computer vision, and depth cameras are also covered. We start off by discussing the basic topics such as image and video loading, rendering and processing, playing sound samples, and synthesizing new sounds. We then move on to cover 3D graphics, computer vision, and depth cameras. You will also learn a number of advanced topics such as video mapping, interactive floors and walls, video morphing, networking, and using geometry shaders. You will learn everything you need to know in order to create your own projects; create projects of all levels, ranging from simple creative-code experiments, to big interactive systems consisting of a number of computers, depth cameras, and projectors.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Mastering openFrameworks: Creative Coding Demystified
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Using ofTexture for memory optimization


There are two types of memory in a computer – Random Access Memory (RAM), which is used by the Central Processing Unit (CPU), and video memory, which is used by the video card; that is, the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). RAM is intended for making calculations and video memory is used for drawing something on the screen.

Note

A typical GPU contains hundreds of computing cores and its number is increasing every year. This is the reason why new GPUs can have more computing power than CPUs, which has just 1 to 16 cores. Today, almost all computations can be made on the GPU using technologies such as shaders, OpenCL or NVIDIA CUDA. Hence the CPU is no longer the most important unit in a computer. For example, the visual development platform Derivative Touch Designer (for Windows only) does its processing almost entirely on the GPU.

Though programming in GPUs is a very powerful tool, it's a little tricky when compared to CPU programming. Also, debugging GPUs...