Random Walkers

So, what’s Next?

When you’re learning computer programming there is a big wall the day that you get to Classes and objects, specifically when you start to need to work with basic data structures and with dynamic arrays of objects. In my case, i started with particle systems; but again… what sort of particles systems would be useful for me for motion graphics?

For starters i begun with a random walker exercise in the Processing “Processing a programming handbook for visual designers and artists” Book… and started thinking: hey, it’d be nice to have a particle system entirely made of this little thingies, wouldn’t it? so, here it is.

These were some of the first tries.

At that time, my way to manage dynamic arrays was a bit straight-forward… instead of using processing’s ArrayLists, I was using just a normal array of elements and the append() function… which with time proved not to be really fast.

Also i started noticing how you could work on anything that moves either in a cumulative or dynamic way, meaning doing a painting of sorts by never calling background() or doing an animation by completely redrawing every frame. This is also called Aggregate and instantaneous visualizations…

A bit more on that here, at Jared Tarbell’s Complexification.net site. Where you may start noticing that even using such a deterministic media as code, creative expression takes over, and the same tasks assigned to different artists end up with very different results.