code Archives - Page 5 of 5

Interactive Generative Art Series – 02 – Random Color

Posted on February 1, 2011August 29, 2014 by Evan Mullins

With this example we’re taking a look at having randomly changing color. I liked the limits to the color in the last post, but couldn’t help myself and wanted to see it with the full range of colors to command. Also, I wasn’t a huge fan when the color would “wrap” and jump from one color to the next so fast. I wanted to use the same velocity (rate of change) principle from the line width experiment but apply it to color, and have it meander aimlessly among all colors. I created a color object to store a value for each of the RGB color values, and then had each element of the color change independently. I didn’t want to complicate my loop function so I made a new function that is called from loop that steps along to a color which should be pretty close to the previous color. I enjoy the range, but as I expected it was a bit much, or too many colors at once, also the step is a bit too fast at times it seems.

02 Color, play here

[kml_flashembed publishmethod=”dynamic” fversion=”9.0.0″ movie=”https://circlecube.com/circlecube/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2011/02/gen-art-02-color.swf” width=”550″ height=”550″ targetclass=”flashmovie”]

Please visit the blog article to view this interactive flash content. Flash plug-in required:

[/kml_flashembed]

actionscript source code

[cc lang=”actionscript”]
var ball:Sprite = new Sprite();

ball.graphics.beginFill(0x333333, 1);
ball.graphics.drawCircle(0, 0, 30);
ball.graphics.endFill();
addChild(ball);

var div:Number = .1;

var ax:Number = 0;
var ay:Number = 0;

var line_max_width:Number = 50;
var line_min_width:Number = 0;
var line_width:Number = Math.random() * line_max_width;
var line_width_velocity:Number = 0;
var dampen:Number = 0.95;

var colors:Object = new Object();
colors.r = 0;
colors.g = 0;
colors.b = 255;
colors.rv = 0;
colors.gv = 0;
colors.bv = 0;

function loop () {
ball.x -= ax = (ax + (ball.x – mouseX) * div) * .9;
ball.y -= ay = (ay + (ball.y – mouseY) * div) * .9;

line_width_velocity += Math.random() * 6 – 3;
line_width += line_width_velocity;
line_width_velocity *= dampen;
if(line_width > line_max_width) { line_width = line_max_width; }
if (line_width < line_min_width) { line_width = line_min_width; }

color_step();

this.graphics.lineStyle(line_width, rgb2hex(colors.r, colors.g, colors.b), 1);
this.graphics.lineTo(ball.x, ball.y);
}

setInterval(loop, 1000/30);

Download

View the swf and get the fla here

Interactive Generative Art Series – 01 – Color

Posted on January 31, 2011August 29, 2014 by Evan Mullins

After updating the line width to be still random, but more of a gradual step in variation (in the first experiment in this series), the second most obvious edit to the original in this generative art series is the color of the line. While it would be pretty simple to update the code to use any one solid color in place of the black, I wanted the color to vary over time. The simplest way I know to achieve this is to create a variable to hold the color value (as a number) and then change it over time. So here, I have a color chosen at random and just increment it every time the loop function executes by 1024. I chose this amount because it would loop through and eventually get back to where it started while restricting the color scheme. I think it brings a lot to the design to have color – and I especially like how it randomly creates a color scheme and sticks to it. Totally random colors may look a bit much, while problematically it’s not too difficult to get, it may be difficult to look at once it’s created. Above are a few screen shots of the random colors generated:

01 Color, play here

[kml_flashembed publishmethod=”dynamic” fversion=”9.0.0″ replaceId=”gen-art-01″ movie=”https://circlecube.com/circlecube/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2011/01/gen-art-01-color.swf” width=”550″ height=”550″ targetclass=”flashmovie”]

Please visit the blog article to view this interactive flash content. Flash plug-in required:

[/kml_flashembed]

Source Code

[cc lang=”actionscript”]
var ball:Sprite = new Sprite();

ball.graphics.beginFill(0x333333, 1);
ball.graphics.drawCircle(0, 0, 30);
ball.graphics.endFill();
addChild(ball);

var div:Number = .1;

var ax:Number = 0;
var ay:Number = 0;

var line_max_width:Number = 50;
var line_min_width:Number = 0;
var line_width:Number = Math.random() * line_max_width;
var line_width_velocity:Number = 0;
var dampen:Number = 0.95;

var color:Number = Math.floor(Math.random() * 16777215);

function loop () {
ball.x -= ax = (ax + (ball.x – mouseX) * div) * .9;
ball.y -= ay = (ay + (ball.y – mouseY) * div) * .9;

setInterval(loop, 1000/30);
[/cc]
You’ll see if you’re following along that this only add 2 lines of code from the last version. We simply create and instantiate (with a random value) the color variable and then apply it in place of the black to the lineStyle and simultaneously increment it. Check the example swf here and get the fla here.

Interactive Generative Flash Art Series – 00 – Line Width

Posted on January 28, 2011August 29, 2014 by Evan Mullins

After seeing the source code in the original experiment, I found myself wanting to play with the code. I saw many elements of the lines and actions that could be interesting to explore. This is the first in a series, of experiments I’ll post starting from this code and pushing different things each time. They’ll start slow and simple, like this one. All I’m doing is adding a few lines of code. The first thing I wanted to see from the original was a more gradual step in the width of the line. Here are a few screenshots from this iteration:

Play here

[kml_flashembed publishmethod=”dynamic” fversion=”9.0.0″ replaceId=”gen-art-00″ movie=”https://circlecube.com/circlecube/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2011/01/gen-art-00-line-width.swf” width=”550″ height=”550″ targetclass=”flashmovie”]

Please visit the blog article to view this interactive flash content. Flash plug-in required:

[/kml_flashembed]

Source Code

[cc lang=”actionscript”]
var ball:Sprite = new Sprite();
ball.graphics.beginFill(0x333333, 1);
ball.graphics.drawCircle(0, 0, 30);
ball.graphics.endFill();
addChild(ball);

var div:Number = .1;
var ax:Number = 0;
var ay:Number = 0;

var line_max_width:Number = 30;
var line_min_width:Number = 0;
var line_width:Number = Math.random() * line_max_width;
var line_width_velocity:Number = 0;
var dampen:Number = 0.95;

function loop () {
ball.x -= ax = (ax + (ball.x – mouseX) * div) * .9;
ball.y -= ay = (ay + (ball.y – mouseY) * div) * .9;

line_width_velocity += Math.random() * 4 – 2;
line_width += line_width_velocity;
line_width_velocity *= dampen;
if(line_width > line_max_width) { line_width = line_max_width; }
if (line_width < line_min_width) { line_width = line_min_width; }
this.graphics.lineStyle(line_width, 0, 1);
this.graphics.lineTo(ball.x, ball.y);
}

setInterval(loop, 1000/30);
[/cc]

Method Explained

If you need a little walk through on my method to achieve this, all I did was create a variable to hold my line width, and the line width velocity (or rate of change). Every frame the line velocity grows or shrinks randomly and is applied to the line width variable. I apply a dampen to the velocity so it doesn’t get too out of hand and then set some limits to the line width. Pretty simple and it applies the same method of applying velocity to an object to make it move, but this velocity is being applied to a property of the object (width) that may not be as obvious as position. This still gives an effect of random width to the lines, but they are randomly widening and thinning, rather than just having random widths. It gives it a more fluid appearance. Any other ways you would use to achieve the same effect?

Download

Here’s the swf in action as well as the fla.

Interactive Generative Flash Art Series Intro

Posted on January 27, 2011August 29, 2014 by Evan Mullins

The world has been excited by html5/css3 recently and has been pushing limits and experimenting. It’s been exciting and funny at the same time – most of the things that are amazing people in html5 experiments have been done 5 years ago in flash. I’ve enjoyed it so much though because it has brought me back to what made me fall for flash initially: sites like levitated.net and yugop.com. People that wrote books about programming actionscript like Keith Peters, Jim Bumgardener Colin Moock, Robert Penner etc… and then art by people like Erik Natzke. I’m a geek and these guys are some of my heros (and don’t think that list is exhausted, I’ve got plenty of unmentioned flash heros), but not just because they could/can do what they do, but because they selflessly (open source-ly) taught me how to do some of it. The magic of creating something so engaging, responsive, animated, unique, random. Little experiments that feel like they contain so much life and are so lightweight -easily less than 10,240 bytes (read 10kb). I knew in high school trig and calculus that those formulas had power, but seeing it unfold and interact with it really is magical to me.

A little inspiration

So, I’ve been toying with a lot of the things that actually taught me (or at least pushed me to learn) the basics of programming. With the years experience under my belt now I’m understanding it on a totally different level and all I want to do is find more things to make balls and lines bounce, move and swirl. And I also want to share it. Well, I recently stumbled upon a flash sneak peak video by Erik Natzke about some of his technique and then his open source files and really had some fun. Anyways I wanted to share some of the experiments that came from it. Let me know your thoughts and download the code and play with it. Let me know what else you come up with and share what you learn. I’ll start this series with a post of the original experiment from Erik on his blog here, Flash Code 101.

Natzke’s Flash Code 101

[kml_flashembed publishmethod=”dynamic” fversion=”9.0.0″ replaceId=”alt-ball-natzke” movie=”https://circlecube.com/circlecube/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2011/01/ball-natzke.swf” width=”550″ height=”550″ targetclass=”flashmovie”]

Please visit the blog article to view this interactive flash content. Flash plug-in required:

[/kml_flashembed]

If it looks like greek to you, I’d suggest going to Keith Peter’s tutorials (especially the first few on gravity, easing and elasticity).

Actionscript 3

For something so fun, it’s amazing that it’s barely over a dozen lines of code.
[cc lang=”actionscript”]
var Ball:Sprite = new Sprite();
Ball.graphics.beginFill(0x333333, 1);
Ball.graphics.drawCircle(0, 0, 30);
Ball.graphics.endFill();
addChild(Ball);

var div:Number = .1;
var ax:Number = 0;
var ay:Number = 0;

function loop () {
Ball.x -= ax = (ax + (Ball.x – mouseX) * div) * .9;
Ball.y -= ay = (ay + (Ball.y – mouseY) * div) * .9;
this.graphics.lineStyle(Math.random()*10, 0, 1);
this.graphics.lineTo(Ball.x, Ball.y);
}

setInterval(loop, 1000/30);
[/cc]

Here’s the swf in action, or download the fla to play (if you really would rather download a file than copy 15 lines of code).

Resolution

Well, I’ll be playing with this code and others and posting the experiments with some screenshots of what I create get’s created.

Better jquery mega-menu tutorial

Posted on July 14, 2010August 29, 2014 by Evan Mullins

My earlier simple mega menu implementation post displayed some simple css and jquery to explode a standard navigation menu into a mega-menu… I’ve made it even better. My biggest issue with that implementation was that it did not keep the order like you’d expect. It read left to right in columns rather than down each column. In the example you can see the first column of three would read from the top: a, d, g, j… this could potentially be confusing. So I wanted to update it to keep the order better and just stack the columns of elements rather than the elements themselves.

I used some different jquery to execute this. First we walk through the menu elements and calculate which column they should be in. We basically map that element’s (li)index to the column it should be, some big math. Luckily I had some experience from actionscript in my arsenal doing just that, so porting the function to javascript I was ready to go. If your number X falls between A and B, and you would like to convert it to Y which falls between C and D follow this formula: Y = (X-A)/(B-A) * (D-C) + C. Plugging this function in and cancelling out the zeros and adding some rounding to get integers I got: Math.floor((liindex / $total * $cols)+1). Using this I added a class to each ‘li’ designating which column it should be in, and then used wrapAll to wrap them into column divs. Very simple and a much better implementation overall anyways. Better code, better user experience… what more can you ask… so here’s the example and jquery code. I’m thinking I should make this into a jquery plugin or something, any thoughts?

See the mega menu in action

Javascript code

[cc lang=”javascript”]
jQuery(document).ready(function() {
//clean up the row of the mega menu. add css class to each element on bottom row.
//only if more than 7 elements. if more than 16, mm-3
jQuery(‘#nav li ul’).each(function(ulindex, ulele){
$total = jQuery(this).children(‘li’).size();
if ($total <= 7) { jQuery(this).addClass('mm-1'); } else { $cols = Math.floor(($total) / 8) + 1; $remainder = $total % $cols; $rows = Math.ceil($total / $cols); jQuery(this).addClass('mm-' + $cols + ' total-' + $total + ' rem-'+$remainder );jQuery(this).children().each(function(liindex, liele){ //alert("total: "+$total+", remainder: "+ $mod+", ulindex: "+ulindex+", liindex: "+liindex); //If your number X falls between A and B, and you would like to convert it to Y which falls between C and D follow this formula: Y = (X-A)/(B-A) * (D-C) + C. jQuery(this).addClass('col-' + Math.floor((liindex / $total * $cols)+1) ); if( (liindex+1) % $rows == 0) { jQuery(this).addClass('last'); } });for (var colcount = 1; colcount<= $cols; colcount++){ jQuery(this).children('.col-'+colcount).wrapAll('

‘);
}
}
});
});
[/cc]

css

[cc lang=”css”]
ul { list-style:none; }

/********** < Navigation */ .nav-container { float:left; background: #398301; margin: 10em 0; width: 960px; } #nav { border: 0px none; padding:3px 0 2px 44px; margin:0; font-size:13px; }/* All Levels */ #nav li { text-align:left; position:relative; } #nav li.over { z-index:999; } #nav li.parent {} #nav li a { display:block; text-decoration:none; } #nav li a:hover { text-decoration:none; } #nav li a span { display:block; white-space:nowrap; cursor:pointer; } #nav li ul a span { white-space:normal; }/* 1st Level */ #nav li { float:left; } #nav li a { float:left; padding:5px 10px; font-weight:normal; color: #fff; text-shadow: 1px 1px #1b3f00; } #nav li a:hover { color: #fff; text-shadow: 1px 1px 3px #ccc; } #nav li.over a, #nav li.active a { color:#fff; }/* 2nd Level */ #nav ul { position:absolute; width:15em; top:26px; left:-10000px; border:1px solid #1b3f00; border-width: 0 1px 2px 1px; background:#398301; padding: 6px 0 6px; } #nav ul div.col { float:left; width: 15em; } #nav ul li { float:left; padding: 0; width: 15em; } #nav ul li a { float:none; padding:6px 9px; font-weight:normal; color:#FFF !important; text-shadow: 1px 1px #1b3f00; border-bottom:1px solid #1b3f00; background:#398301; } #nav ul li a:hover { color:#fff !important; text-shadow: 1px 1px 3px #ccc; background: #2b6301; } #nav ul li.last > a { border-bottom:0; }
#nav ul li.last.parent > a { border-bottom:0; }

#nav ul li.over > a { font-weight:normal; color:#fff !important; background: #1b3f00; }
#nav ul.mm-1 { width: 15em; }
#nav ul.mm-2 { width: 30em; }
#nav ul.mm-3 { width: 45em; }
#nav ul.mm-4 { width: 60em; }
/* 3rd+ leven */
#nav ul ul { top:-6px; background: #1b3f00; }

/* Show Menu – uses built-in magento menu hovering */
#nav li.over > ul { left:0; }
#nav li.over > ul li.over > ul { left:14em; }
#nav li.over ul ul { left:-10000px; }

/* Show Menu – uses css only, not fully across all browsers but, for the purpose of the demo is fine by me */
#nav li:hover > ul { left:0; z-index: 100; }
#nav li:hover > ul li:hover > ul { left:14em; z-index: 200; }
#nav li:hover ul ul { left:-10000px; }
[/cc]

Download

Visit this demo page and view source or save as…