Benjamin Van Citters

Last year, when I was too busy with a myriad of other things a piece of art called vanishing point by Matt W. Moore caught my eye. I thought, “Hey that reminds me of the stuff I make.” So I made a program which can be seen below.

[processing width=”450″ height=”300″ file=”https://benvancitters.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/spimmer.jar” method=”onclick”][/processing]

Click the image to load the program. After it’s loaded if you click and hold down the mouse you get a fancy spin effect.

The graphic is created by drawing a bunch of triangles around the mouse position with Processing’s beginShape() and endShape() routines.

This is an experiment that I started last year to play with Bezier curves. One nice thing about Bezier curves is that all values along the resulting curve will be contained within the four defining points. In my experiment, the points defining the curve are animated through three-space between 0 and 255 and the points along it are interpreted as RGB values. Because all points along the curve are guaranteed to have xyz values between 0 and 255 they can all be interpreted nicely as colors. I believe that there have been other uses of these curves to define gradients in programs such as Photoshop, but I started my work from scratch and I find the result to be very pleasant.

This will be the new face of my programming efforts.  Thank you wordpress!