This article builds off my previous article, Intro to Cairo Graphics in Rust. In that, I briefly described how to install Rust and the Cairo graphics library and set up a Rust project using the cairo-rs bindings. With that article, and a bit of dedicated research on your own, you should have been able to start coding some drawings using the Rust programming language. In this article, I’m going to build on what I described there, and introduce my own library, bitlib-rs, that adds a bunch of new functionality on top of Cairo.
So here’s the obligatory New Year’s Resolution post. I’m not going to tell you what my resolutions are, or what yours should be, but I have been mulling over some guiding principles for quite a while. These aren’t resolutions, per se. But they are guideposts I try to keep in mind personally when thinking about my resolutions, or in fact, whenever I’m taking any action.
So here you go, my four principles. These are all in the form of “X is greater than Y”. In each case, this does not mean that X is holy and Y is evil. It just means that when all else is equal, I would prefer to give preference to X over Y.
Read more...It’s that time of year when we look back to see how things have gone in the last year, what we accomplished, how well we stuck to our goals, any major changes – good or bad, and start making plans for the next year. All arbitrarily based on a calendar system someone made up centuries ago, but so be it. If there’s no natural origin point, make one up.
2017 was a year of massive change for me. I changed companies once and changed jobs twice. And to a large degree, I actually changed careers once. I abandoned one coding platform, ramped up on another one and started learning an entirely new one.
Read more...In the past few weeks, I’ve been itching to learn some new stuff. Those who know me even just a little bit know that “new stuff” is generally going include “new ways of creating graphics and/or animations”. And so it does this time.
I’ve been creating graphics in HTML5 Canvas for quite a few years now, and that’s cool. But there are a few pain points with its workflow:
It sometimes seems silly to pipe everything through the browser all the time. I’d like to just be able to run a program and have it create a file and display that file.
Read more...In Flow Fields, Part I, we covered what a flow field is and looked at a few different formulas to create them. And we rendered flow fields in a various ways. We even animated particles being influenced by fields. In this article we’ll cover a couple more ways to generate flow fields and some new ways to render them. As I said in the first part, the possibilities are endless. I’m just pointing you in a few directions to get started.
Read more...Maybe you’ve heard the term “flow field” and maybe you’ve seen some neat pictures or animations with the term attached. In this article, I’ll cover what a flow field is, show how to create one, and give a few examples of experimenting with them. Flow fields are also known as vector fields.
The Pre-Game Show
I’ll be using HTML5, JavaScript and Canvas for this article, but the concepts will apply to Processing, p5js, WebGL, or just about any other graphics programming platform. That being the case, I’m going to try to focus less on the canvas specific stuff and more on the core concepts.
Read more...History
I’ve been coding – as a hobbyist – since the 1980’s. But I’d say my programming career actually started around 1998, when I first accepted money for writing code. Make no mistake – the money I received at that time was worth a hell of a lot more than the code I was writing. But I like to think I’ve improved over the years and that my value as a coder is a considerably more commensurate with my current compensation.
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