Week #8

For Week #8 I am to share my experience with both Hydra and p5live. Let's start with Hydra. Hydra is an incredibly unique language/program. It's hard to even classify. I guess it could be said to be "live code" but it also has a unique format. You are given a list of function that can be used to create and manipulate oscillating signals in all sorts of different ways. In color, size, shape, scale, and all of these options can be mixed and matched to specify what you want the output to look like. On top of the basics there are a number of custom functions such as coloroma(), vornoi(), and thresh(), that when combined can make some truly one of a kind visual pieces. For my creation I wanted to try to make something slightly lifelike from the wild functions I have to choose from here, so I decided to make something inspired by a 'rainy day'. I tried to create a gloomy gray background along with some perlin noise that scrolled downwards using the scroll Y feature to resemble rain. The more features I added the more I realized it's difficult to use this software to create tangible, realistic shapes. This application is more useful for creating abstract visuals that can move and transform in novel ways. I eventually repurposed my rainy day attempt into a sort of red tv static scroll, and I think it looks kind of cool.For me, p5live was significantly more obtuse than Hydra. It took me a bit of poking around through the about page and watching external YouTube videos to begin to get a grasp on how to operate it. Eventually, I learned that I could create the 3 dimensional spheres in p5live, so I wanted to created something where these colorful spheres could rotate around the screen. It seems that there is a lot of depth to p5live. I was overwhelmed with the amount of choices. I learned I had to add  ambient light to the canvas to allow the spheres to be visible.  I then added variables for all the factors for each sphere such as their size, speed color, movement offset, and individual rotation. The result is these sort of planetary rotating orbs, this project was fun and taught me a lot more about utilizing 3D tools in p5js. Overall I think Hydra and P5js serve different purposes and each have their own strengths for creating visuals. Visuals created with hydra are stylized and simpler, it can change drastically with quick adjustments making it ideal for live coding both aesthetically and practically. P5js allows for more options but it will require more tinkering and bug testing than Hydra. When creating more long form projects I think p5js is ideal and it also seems to be a great collaborative tool for coding with others. If multiple people were editing a visual art project at once on p5js I could see it being a very dynamic and appealing work.