daniel shiffman » Teaching

New Processing Tutorial

Daniel — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 02:43:52 +0000

I’ve added a new tutorial to the Processing web site about the String class and displaying text onscreen. Enjoy!

Art+Code 4Ever

Daniel — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 22:56:21 +0000

It’s taken me a little while, but here’s a brief recap of what was quite possibly the most heart-warming and thrilling conference I will ever have the chance to attend — ART + CODE: a symposium on programming environments for artists, young people, and the rest of us.

First, a hearty thank you to Golan Levin who did a tremendous job planning and organizing the mind-bending experience. Some highlights:

Oxford Project Part III — Thanks to the ever ebullient Ira Greenberg and Miami University for sponsoring (and the Studio for Creative Inquiry @ CMU for giving us space), we were able to convene before the main festivities began to give Processing a push towards some number past 1.0. Stay tuned for exciting improvements in Processing’s video and OPENGL libraries as well as to the IDE itself.

Saturday was a day full of workshops. In the morning, I attempted to teach an entire semester of ICM in under three hours, followed by an afternoon mix of topics related to physics simulation and image processing.

Sunday was the day to end all days with the lineup of speakings including lead developers of the languages / environments: Alice, Pure Data, Scratch, Hackety Hack, Processing, Max/MSP/Jitter, vvvv, ExtendScript, and openFrameworks. Some highlights within highlights here were Luke Dubois’ demo of “what is known in the biz as random atonal crap” and Sebastian Oschatz’s boy band metaphor for multi-screen setups (one that I really need to take a look at more closely as we develop “most pixels ever” at ITP.) Videos of all the Sunday talks will eventually be posted at vimeo/artandcode.

On Monday, I was lucky to have the chance before heading home to catch the work of Casey Reas and Marius Watz at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts.

Of course, all of this was really just an excuse for a nice group photo.

Path Following Dot Product Tutorial

Daniel — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 03:49:06 +0000

As an addendum to the previous post, here’s an early draft excerpt from Chapter 7 on steering behaviors, more specifically a tutorial related to my new path following examples. Also an excuse to cover the dot product in more detail. All based on Craig Reynolds of course.

Nature of Code Book

Daniel — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 03:35:43 +0000

This semester, I’ve started working on expanding my nature of code tutorials into a book. My plan is to self-publish (looking into a few options) and have drafts available for download / purchase as early as this summer. I’ll also be publishing excerpts from the book as tutorials on processing.org (the first will be a PVector tutorial) and on this site as well.

Here is a PDF of the draft table of contents for those who are curious. Feedback is welcome!

More Steering Examples

Daniel — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 22:26:44 +0000

I’ve added three new steering examples (based, of course, off of Craig Reynolds’ Steering Behaviors for Autonomous Characters) to the nature of code tutorials. Ultimately, it’s my goal to build out all of Reynolds’ algorithms into a Processing library (much like Open Steer), so stay tuned. . .

Path Following
Flow Field
Crowd Path Following

I hope to have a new tutorial about the use of the PVector dot product in the path following examples posted in the next day or two as well.

Cosmonaut Zoog and Friends

Daniel — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 21:04:44 +0000

The first half of my new book Learning Processing follows a simple creature design through a life of programming fundamentals: pixels, shapes, variables, conditionals, loops, functions, objects, arrays. Now that the book is out, I’m pleased to see that Zoog has some friends to hang out with. Here is a selection of little alien beings from Introduction to Computational Media.

And there’s also a nice selection from Matt Soar’s class at Concordia University.

All hail Ficello, King of Cheese!