I found animation by code as something really fascinating. How we can manipulate particles and give them 'life' by playing around with parameters such as emitter radius, velocity, lifetime, rotating angle, and many kinds of forces, spinning and damping (friction). In this project the only addons being used is just ofxUI for the GUI and ofxXmlSettings to load different saved presets. The reason I used ofxUI instead of ofxGUI is the 2D-Pad controller that enables me to move around the particles as if I'm using them as a brush in Photoshop. It looks cool and it's fun to play around with! This was also my first time learning how to save and load preset files into .xml format, thus afterwards I made selection of keypress events from 1, 2, 3, ... 9 to load different presets. Each preset holds different value of each parameter entitled to the particle itself.

The code for this can be found on my Github, try playing around with different values and see what kind of visuals you can come up with!

SCREENSHOTS

What I like from this project is the surprising visuals as a result from movement changes from one preset to another. Because all of the preset values can be changed as simple as hitting the keyboard 1 to 9, the sudden movement creates beautiful transition effects as the old particles die and new particles are born. The end result is something that kind of looks like a child's drawing, especially when you play around with the rotating angle and spinning force, it forms funky curls with crayon-like colors.

(Click on each image below to open up a lightbox)

I'm having fun with particles!