Cinder is one of the most exciting frameworks available for creative coding. It is developed in C++ for increased performance and allows for the fast creation of visually complex and interactive applications. The big advantage of Cinder is that it can target many platforms such as Mac, Windows, and iOS with the exact same code.
Cinder Creative Coding Cookbook will show you how to develop interactive and visually dynamic applications using simple-to-follow recipes.
You will learn how to use multimedia content, draw generative graphics in 2D and 3D, and animate them in compelling ways.
Beginning with creating simple projects with Cinder, you will use multimedia, create animations, and interact with the user.
From animation with particles to using video, audio, and images, the reader will gain a broad knowledge of creating creative applications using Cinder.
With recipes that include drawing in 3D, image processing, and sensing and tracking in real-time from camera input, this book will teach you how to develop interactive applications that can be run on a desktop computer, mobile device, or be a part of an interactive installation.
This book will give you the necessary knowledge to start creating projects with Cinder that use animations and advanced visuals.
Chapter 1, Getting Started, teaches you the fundamentals of creating applications using Cinder.
Chapter 2, Preparing for Development, introduces several simple recipes that can be very useful during the development process.
Chapter 3, Using Image Processing Techniques, consists of examples of using image processing techniques implemented in Cinder and using third-party libraries.
Chapter 4, Using Multimedia Content, teaches us how to load, manipulate, display, save, and share videos, graphics, and mesh data.
Chapter 5, Building Particle Systems, explains how to create and animate particles using popular and versatile physics algorithms.
Chapter 6, Rendering and Texturing Particle Systems, teaches us how to render and apply textures to our particles in order to make them more appealing.
Chapter 7, Using 2D Graphics, is about how to work and draw with 2D graphics using the OpenGL and built-in Cinder tools.
Chapter 8, Using 3D Graphics, goes through the basics of creating graphics in 3D using OpenGL and some useful wrappers that Cinder includes in some advanced OpenGL features.
Chapter 9, Adding Animation, presents the techniques of animating 2D and 3D objects. We will also introduce Cinder's features in this field such as Timeline and math functions.
Chapter 10, Interacting with the User, creates the graphical objects that react to the user using both mouse and touch interaction. It also teaches us how to create simple graphical interfaces that have their own events for greater flexibility, and integrate with the popular physics library Bullet Physics.
Chapter 11, Sensing and Tracking Input from the Camera, explains how to receive and process data from input devices such as a camera or a Microsoft Kinect sensor.
Chapter 12, Using Audio Input and Output, is about generating sound with the examples, where sound is generated on object's collision in physics simulation. We will present examples of visualizing sound with audio reactive animations.
Appendix, Integrating with Bullet Physics, will help us learn how to integrate Bullet Physics library with Cinder.
This chapter is available as a downloadable file at: http://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/Integrating_with_Bullet_Physics.pdf
Mac OS X or Windows operating system. Mac users will need XCode, which is available free from Apple and iOS SDK, if they wish to use iOS recipes. Windows users will need Visual C++ 2010. Express Edition is available for free. Windows users will also need Windows Platform SDK installed. While writing this book the latest release of Cinder was 0.8.4.
This book is for C++ developers who want to start or already began using Cinder for building creative applications. This book is easy to follow for developers who use other creative coding frameworks and want to try Cinder.
The reader is expected to have basic knowledge of C++ programming language.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "We can include other contexts through the use of the include directive."
A block of code is set as follows:
gl::setMatricesWindow(getWindowWidth(), getWindowHeight()); gl::color( ColorA(0.f,0.f,0.f, 0.05f) ); gl::drawSolidRect(getWindowBounds()); gl::color( ColorA(1.f,1.f,1.f, 1.f) ); mParticleSystem.draw();
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
$ ./fullbuild.sh
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "clicking the Next button moves you to the next screen".
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