Metaphor description and Time management

Metaphor is the concept of understanding one thing in terms of another (Wikipedia, 2011).

Time Management –

Today = 13^th May

Chosen if/else statements.
Concepts ready for interim presentation.
Like a particular concept, and would like to start developing to the next stage.

Sunday = 15^th May

Developed next stage of sketches for metaphor.
Researched examples of animation-included code for processing
Experimenting with code. 

         

Friday = 20^th May -----> Sunday = 22nd May

               Create and record entire photoshop speed painting process.

(Between these two dates (above and below), the code will be created on Processing and animation images will be imported into code)

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Completion date = 27^th May

               Complete 200-300 word description of exhibition
               Exhibition complete with a few days left to fix last minute issues.

Concept Three

This was actually the first idea that popped into my head when researching for ideas on 'if/else' statements.

The kid that loves chocolate/but only a certain type of chocolate.

This would be a game created on processing.
It would consist of animation/a boy/a box of chocolate.

The idea of this is if the user/audience chooses the right chocolate from that box - so that when the boy bites into it, it displays its contents (ie, gooey caramel or peppermint), if this chocolate is the type the animated boy is searching for, he remains happy and you continue to search for his chocolates in the box.
If somehow you choose a turkish delight, and he happens to dislike them, you loose the game and the animated boy starts to have a tantrum (all displayed via priorly made animated responses).

Concept Two

Creating an animation on a few hundred cards and making a machine to flick through them quickly for the exhibition. I know once all the cards have flicked through, it would have to restart. That is exactly what it would do.

Imagine - hundred or so cards (size of a large open hand), on one side of these cards is a black outline sketch that changes slightly on each card (therefor creating the animation on quick flick through). The other side of the card will be a sketch that changes with movement too.

The if/else kicks in...... now!
If the audience/user stands to the left of the card flicking machine, in open view of the one side of the pack of cards, they will view the if statement.
For example, 'if I were to walk to work today, I would take a scenic route but it would take longer'.

Now, if the audience were to stand on the other side of the deck of cards, they would view the 'else' statement.
For example, 'else, if I were to take my car to work today, I would get there quickly and start work earlier'.


I think this would definitely explain what if/else statements do.

This concept would cost more than concept One. It requires a machine to handle and flick through cards quickly while keeping them in view of the audience. This would have to be thoroughly researched before could be made or found. However, the card/animation aspect would be less time absorbing than Concept One.

This is a film strip, not a card animation but it shows what I mean.

Concept One

I started thinking...again, yes, I do think. I can illustrate a 'if/else' term by creating a animation on processing but giving the user/audience the tools to create the end result.

For example:

There are tools on a tool panel created by me on the screen.
The user selects the tools of choice and the animation responds accordingly.

The lower image is just a simple example of a sketch created within the animation.

This idea will be labour intensive to create but attached to no extra cost. All that is needed for thisexhibition to work is a computer and processing.

The reason I say this would demonstrate a 'if/else statement' is because, if the user chooses a tool but not another tool sitting next to it, it will create a completely different result from the 'else'/'other' tool.

If I choose a black outline pen, paper, and lamp - it will produce a sketch on a piece of paper with a light to display it/and help with the creation of it, but no colour will be sued. It will end up being a black outline and detailed image.

else if, I choose colour pencils, paper, lamp - it will create a sketch of the shaded colour on paper. No black outline.

else, I choose colour pencils, paper, black pen - it will not have a light to create anything, therefore the end result will be a slight mess (as if someone were sketching in the dark) and the process of animation would be dark too (until the user selected the lamp tool).

Research and Mind-Mapping

The start to a whole new project - Project Three:

We were told to come up with a programming term, for example - array, or if/else statements - and create an exhibition to explain to others how this term works/what it is used for, but without directly telling the audience what it is we are talking about. 

We must create a metaphor in place of the term and build something with code, physical utensils, or sound - anything really! Personally, I think this makes the project so much harder. We have guidelines to follow but not many. We can virtually create anything using anything we want, as long as it does not consist of words, spoken or written.

This got me thinking... loooooooong and hard...

I figured in the end, programming something would be in my best interest, considering I'm doing a computer science degree. Next... What term am I going to use and why? How will I create a metaphor?

Hmm...

Below is some of the mind mapping I did while throwing ideas onto paper.

Beginning stage of mind mapping

continue of beginning stage of mind mapping

As above, I have a mind map of 'if/else & conditional statements'. I chose this term because it is something that is used soooooo often in programming, and it is generally the first you learn, before arrays or anything else.

The following are some images that I thought I could be inspired by in some way for this particular project.

Animation vs Animator - I love the idea of animation, but simple stick figure
line animation. This is just a single screen image of the animation. I recommend you have a look at the movie.
Search on google for Animation_vs_Animator

A simple outline of a dog watching a butterfly. Resembles the above animation  some what. I think
my brain is trying to tell me to create a program on processing with a bunch of animation.

Another anime sketch from google search, again just with outline detail.

Project Three

Above: Project three outline and completion dates.

Final Hand In

Water ripples

When I first started on this sketch, I had big plans of creating real water for the lower half of the screen. This has proven more difficult than I realised. I understand to a certain point how it is done, but then I have to take into consideration that I am not creating a water surface that we look straight down into. Instead, this surface has to disappear into the far distance and operate appropriately.

Second solution - create water ripples on the click of the mouse. These ripples must move towards the user and appear to disappear behind the boat. These ripples must get larger in time and weather the mouse is placed over the left half of the screen or the right half of the screen, the ripple shall move more in that direction as it appears closer and closer to the boat.

This appeared to work, but only in response to the press of the mouse. It would disappear as soon as the mouse button was released. This was very inappropriate and had to be changed.

Unfortunately I cannot move these newly coded ripples move towards the boat in sync with the movement of the ceiling and boat.

However, I have coded the ripples to be more transparent the further away the ripple is created and less transparent the closer they are to the boat.

Oh yeah! Another thing that came to mind was the state of the boat. This boat needed to change in some way according to the users input.
Now, when the mouse is moved closer and closer to the boat (the mouse is the torch), the boat appears to radiate the torch glow (orange). I used a black tint for the boat image when the torch was furtherest away from the boat, and a orange tint that became stronger as the mouse moved closer.

The last issue posing is lag!!
Why does my sketch work perfectly at home on processing and then as soon as it is loaded to openprocessing.org, it lags dramatically??? ARGH!

Working with sound

The sound in my sketch obviously isn't musical - rather it's more environmental. I think this is a downfall. I feel I should have created a wind chime soft musical piece to match the magical glow worm environment. Although, I'd then be asked 'But one doesn't find wind chimes in caves... why does this one have them?'...

Anyway, getting back to my point. I have worked on my individual sound bites. I've decreased the volume of some, created continual loops for the rain in the background and have attached the Drips and Torch sound to match clicks of the mouse or movement over an area.

The water droplets/ripples originally created more than one drip sound. I have reduced this to a single drip along with a single ripple. This leaves more power to the user to control where the drips occur. In addition to this. The sound of the drip gets fainter and fainter the further you click up the screen(over the water section). This is to represent depth and distance.

I had a frog croaking to the side of the screen somewhere but have removed this as it was unnecessary.

I've played and played and pondered over the idea of moving the boat from left to right. I had this originally coded in, but removed it after the Friday night presentation. Since then, I have added it. When the boat moves side to side it creates a boat rocking sound. Unfortunately, the is a bug I just cannot get around with the playing of this sound bite. If the keyboard buttons are pressed for a duration of time to move the boat from side to side, it thinks this is a collection of lots of keyboard taps. Due to this, it plays the sound bite over and over again but restarting every quarter of a second. This is silly, but unfixable.

Minimising

The question is 'where is that line between too little and too much?'.

Okay, so I have decided - the horizon in my cave was a stupid idea. This has been removed! Yay for the cave!!
I've actually gone as far as removing the water too. I thought this may pose as an issue but it doesn't. It actually makes you wonder where the water stops and the cave ceiling begins. I have perlin noise on the lower half of my screen to create glow worm reflection. But instead of directly mirroring the ceiling, I've rather created wave lines of perlin noise to represent moving water.

The fire torch - I have had night mares over this silly torch. I can get the particle smoke system working (sort of) in place of the temporary torch... but I can never actually get it to look realistic. Eventually I put my foot down (okay, it wasn't my foot, it was my finger) and removed all the tens of tens of lines of code in charge of the 'smoking fire torch'. Instead, I have now created the affect of moving flames and varying transparency of the glow from the fire to illuminate the screen. This isn't what I originally fantasized about but I got into too much trouble from the grumpy boyfriend for spending too much time on this sketch. Moan moan moan...

Have I mentioned how much I hate arrays?? No I don't think I have. Well, I HATE dealing with arrays!
My dreaded goal is to become more familiar with them and use them without issues in future projects.

Creating this glow worm cave and the little extras

For the Friday night presentation before the uni break, we had to finish our Transformation Project up to a stage it could be used, but unpolished. During the break we were to use the constructive critism given by our tutors to polish up our projects.


Above is the very laggy development final.
a= turns left
b=turns right
right mouse click=water drips and circles are created in area of water
left mouse click=torch sounds

This was yet to have fire flies added, using a particle system, plus the torch was going to be replaced with a realistic torch, leaving a smoke trail.

Something I didn't have quite enough time to figure out was why my hidden leap frogs didn't appear out of the water when I placed my mouse over that region of the screen.
This was planned to be fixed by the next stage of developement until I was advised to tone it down, and that less was possibly more in my case.

The sounds are too blatant in this sketch, and this is something I had to work on for my final hand in.
Another question that arose was "why is there a horizon in a cave?". The reason I created the light at the end of the tunnel (yeah yeah, it doesn't look like much of a tunnel), was to give the illusion that you were going somewhere. You could call it false hope. :)
I have removed this for the next development sketch.

Processing development

I'm currently working on my perlin noise cave ceiling. I've experimented with both P3D and OPENGL in the size parameter... I've found P3D to keep the image smoother than OPENGL.

Update on concept stage!

At this very moment, I am looking at using perlin noise, although, I plan to control the perlin noise, and restrict it's output to create the cave ceiling AND reflection under/on the water below.
I also plan on using another kind of perlin noise to create a swarm of glowing fire flies.

Now, after thinking (yes I do a lot of that surprisingly), I realise if I use perlin to create the cave ceiling, there may not be any point to designing glow worms. This is because the cave will already look like it's covered in glow worms. That is why I'd like to introduce perlin glowing fire flies instead.

The water I plan on creating with ripples etc, but to create the reflection of the ceiling in the water, I will have to create an mirror image of the ceiling under the layer of water. This way it should appear to be a reflection rather than a mere cheat.

Bats... how do I create bats hanging off a perlin cave ceiling? Hmm... This could pose as an issue at this point.

I am thinking of creating the illusion of the end of the cave/tunnel coming nearer and nearer (without actually reaching the end ofcourse!). This may relax the mood a little in the sense it creates hope.

Rainforest sound bite

Sounds | Effects | Sound Bites | Sound Clips from SoundBible.com

This may be useful in a cave environment, it will suffice as background ambience

Torch sound bite

Torch Sounds | Effects | Sound Bites | Sound Clips from SoundBible.com

As you move forward through the cave, imagine moving your torch to see what is lurking to the right of you. This is the sound you should hear!