Project 3 - The Beginning

Late into the project as it may be, I recently remembered a random idea I had a year or so ago that would be perfect for this project: procedurally generated machines. The scope of such an idea is pretty large, so here is how I narrowed it down to use the ideas of hierarchy:

• A 2D mechanical machine, made up of procedurally assembled moving parts like pistons and wheels. Clicking on a region would zoom in, and when a part became large enough it would be replaced by a collection of smaller parts that did the same job.

Advantages with this one include dynamic motion possibilities, 2D is fairly simple and everything can be made from scratch in Processing. Disadvantages are potentially flat composition colour-wise, difficulty of resolving motion, difficulty of preventing parts overlap and difficulty of zooming in/replacing/culling unnecessary parts.

• A 3D machine that does not move, but instead expands into an exploded view to reveal all its parts. Clicking on a part will zoom in on that part and erase the others, then that part can be exploded, and so on. Ideally 3D forms will be generated in Processing to suit.

Advantages include no need to solve motion issues, impressive interactivity available with 3D, awesomeness of exploded views. Disadvantages include severe difficulty in generating 3D geometry for the purposes I want.

I will need to investigate further to see if I can come up with any theoretical methods for approaching these problems, starting with sketching. I also need to explore the exact aesthetics qualities I am looking for.

My inspirations for machine aesthetics (and my love for exploded views) come most recently from the game Portal 2 and also from the Iron Man credits.

Portal 2

Iron Man credits

I would love to do some sort of edge detection shading just to cap off the blueprints feels. From studying the Iron Man credits further though, this is not a trivial thing to get right. They seem to be drawing edges where only one face is visible, rather than just getting an overall outline, so a simpler hack where a flat coloured version of a shape is drawn a bit larger and behind the real shape won't achieve this level of detail. I may have to look into GLSL or something...