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

The basics of particle systems


Objects such as clouds and fire have no distinct shape, so it is hard to draw them using polygons. The novel method for drawing such objects was proposed by William T. Reeves in his article, Particle Systems—a Technique for Modeling a Class of Fuzzy Objects (ACM Transactions on Graphics, April 1983). The idea is in using particle systems, which are controllable sets of particles—small independently moving objects, considered as elementary components of the rendered object.

Today, particle systems play an important role in 2D and 3D computer graphics as a tool for photorealistic rendering of real-world fuzzy objects. Also, they are widely used for experimental and creative coding graphics.

Particles are independent objects that move according to some rules such as gravity, force, and friction. Each particle has a number of attributes such as position, velocity, lifetime, size, and color that changes with time.

The most important property of each particle system...