Book Image

Processing 2: Creative Programming Cookbook

Book Image

Processing 2: Creative Programming Cookbook

Overview of this book

Processing is probably the best known creative coding environment that helps you bridge the gap between programming and art. It enables designers, artists, architects, students and many others to explore graphics programming and computational art in an easy way, thus helping you boost your creativity. "Processing 2: Creative Programming Cookbook" will guide you to explore and experience the open source Processing language and environment, helping you discover advanced features and exciting possibilities with this programming environment like never before. You'll learn the basics of 2D and 3D graphics programming, and then quickly move up to advanced topics such as audio and video visualization, computer vision, and much more with this comprehensive guide. Since its birth in 2001, Processing has grown a lot. What started out as a project by Ben Fry and Casey Reas has now become a widely used graphics programming language. Processing 2 has a lot of new and exciting features. This cookbook will guide you to explore the completely new and cool graphics engine and video library. Using the recipes in this cookbook, you will be able to build interactive art for desktop computers, Internet, and even Android devices! You don't even have to use a keyboard or mouse to interact with the art you make. The book's next-gen technologies will teach you how to design interactions with a webcam or a microphone! Isn't that amazing? "Processing 2: Creative Programming Cookbook" will guide you to explore the Processing language and environment using practical and useful recipes.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Processing 2: Creative Programming Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Using lights


If you want to make your 3D scene a little more interesting, you can add light, so your objects don't look flat. There are different kinds of lights available in Processing. We'll take a look at how you can use them in this recipe.

How to do it...

The first thing you need to do is import the OpenGL library and set up an OpenGL window with a resolution of 640 x 480 pixels. Before the setup() function, you need to declare two integers, lightMode and lightDirection, which will be used to switch between the different types of lighting. I've assigned these variables a value of 0 inside the setup() function.

lightMode = 0;
lightDirection = 0;

In the first block of code that goes inside the draw() function, we'll configure the different lights. The lightMode variable is used to switch between lights, and the lightDirection variable is used to set the direction when we are using directional lighting.

background( 0 );
  
switch ( lightMode ) {
  case 0:
    noLights();
    break;
  case 1...