This weekend took me to the BFI Southbank for the OneDotZero – Joys of Processing workshop with Karsten Schmidt of Toxiclibs / Postspectacular.
The workshop was basically an introduction to Processing as a creative tool and was part of the OneDotZero Adventures in Motion Festival 2011.
Workshop photo courtesy of OneDotZero & Martin Senyszak
Day One
We started with some of the usual ‘Hello World’ programming concepts & tasks: drawing to screen, variables, loops, arrays & functions etc. This was of course easy to follow, but did illustrate just how simple it is to get up & running with Processing.
Quickly though, Karsten took us into some more productive territory, by introducing us to Processing Libraries. These really are so useful, and a credit to the open source community that allow us to get projects up & running super quickly.
Of course, most of the workshop we used Karsten’s own Toxiclibs library, which gives you access to 3D, Geometry, Physics, Audio & Data tools with just a few lines of code.
By the end of the day, we’d covered the basics, got our development environment set up, and created a pretty good looking sound visualisation tool! Nice!
Processing Workshop - Simple Audio Visualisation
Day Two
We quickly got back up & running on day to by adding a microphone audio stream analysis to our application.
Then came 3D.. we turned out little 2.5D sound visualiser into a fully fledged 3D frequency landscape (stopping off on the way to import tonal information from images to use as Y values for our Vertices).
Processing Workshop - 3D Audio Visualisation
We also learned how to output our generated 3D landscape as a .OBJ format model for import into other software, like MeshLab and even to send to shapeways.com for 3D printing.
Processing Workshop - 3D with GUI Controls
Finally, in the last 30 mins of day 2, we added a bunch of GUI controls to our application to control the internal variables, like colour, 3D cell size and sensitivity. This was so easy to implement with another great library, ControlP5 by Andreas Schlegel.
Processing Workshop - 3D with GUI Controls
Thanks
Thanks to OneDotZero for organising such a great event & workshop and to Karsten Schmidt for his time, knowledge & patience.
Finally thanks to Processing.org for developing such a great piece of software and everyone in the open source community for contributing their libraries… inspiring!