Ideas

Concept

Now that the concept is completed for this project I thought it might me nice to talk about a couple of other ideas that I would have liked to try implementing if time permitted.

The first would have been to try and create a new appearance by reshaping the grid. The form that I liked the best would have been to make the squares rotate around a centre axis creating a circular appearance.

The other idea was that rather than the shapes only covering the cavas, they could have coved the whole screen, but only been visible through the 'window' of processing. I think it would have been interesting to reveal things that only become visible once dragging occurs

Crash

Concept

The final stage of sound/shape. After experimenting, and as much as I liked the interesting look ellipses can provide I decided to go back to something that more resembled my original design. It just provided the most fluid and interesting appearance. I also asked for feedback from people which suggested as much.

The three sounds have been added so now dragging the canvas initiates the drum roll, crashes of varying volumes and speed are activated depending on speed and there is an ambient lava sound as well. It is amazing how much of a difference these sound make. Now it really feels like you are damaging something.

Unfortunately there appears to be a couple of glitches that I could not fix before it was due. The most irritating is that the explosions sometimes create two sounds instead of one. Still I'm am happy wiht the end product.

Crash - Open Processing Link

 

Sound

Concept

Since this project is primarily about sound, it seemed appropriate to focus on getting it right. Analysis of my work indicated that the three animations of my concept needed sound. Most integral, was the explosion sound that I had located earlier. I edited it so I could provide a different sound depending on speed at which the collision occurs. Next I found a sound for lava and slowed it down. It should provide a nice ambient sound to match the shifting colours.

The last piece of the puzzle was something to match the dragging of the canvas. I liked the idea of building up anticipation and I knew that a drum roll would be an effective way of achieving this. Of course this makes this sound effect the odd-one-out, but I think the tradeoff will be worth it.

Waves

Concept

Now that my application is more developed I can experiment with new effects. This example below changes the shapes to ellipses and has them increasing in size. Although I think this possibly looks nicer than the grid, I don't feel it is as interesting or as well suited to my concept. The experimenting must go on!

Waves - Link to Open Processing

Shimmering

Concept

I'm getting close to a design that fulfils the minim requirements of my original concept. I improved the destruction by making it exponential. Now the damage close to the impact is much larger than the damage further away, which feels much more natural.

The other big change is that the colour now randomly increases or decreases within a small range. This nice small shift makes the concept look like it is shimmering, causing it to look much more fluid and more volcanic. I tried to switch the colour to HSB, but it does not appear to be working as expected. 

Slam - Open Processing Link

Bang!

Concept

This is already a major upgrade over the previous stage of my concept. Displaying the power of 'classes' the spring method now causes particles closest to the point of impact to separate, illustrating that a collision has occurred.

I had to think this though quite a bit. At first I had the particles compressing together, but that looked like made the canvas look like a box that was shrinking. After some research, I released that the particles should look as if they are "pushed apart".

Grid Advanced - Open Processing Link

Grid Moves

Concept

This example applies the moving code from before to the particle class. It's a bit more advanced now, and uses an if statement for the tween. Whatever the speed is divided by (speed determined by dragging distance) is the same value used for frames of animation.

It still has a way to go before it meets my concept, but this provides the foundation.

Grid Moves - Open Processing Link