Nov 25, 2014

I’m still putting together animations and images, so I don’t have much to show until next time, but I’m still at it. Today’s about the refactoring has been happening this past week.

If I didn’t need my programs to respond to input, I would be working in Cinema4d and/or After Effects like most professionals use to build their interfaces. So when I began prototyping, I tried to build a similar setup in my environment with proven animation tools like keyframes and timelines, using tools like ofxTimeline, an openFrameworks plugin for that sort of thing. It’s some sweet stuff, but what I could slap together just wasn’t for me. It wasn’t as smooth as the professional programs and the animations I produced with it were always slightly off: the timing was wrong, coordinating multiple objects was awkward, and it just looked sloppy. Example from before, used ofxTimeline.

Since then, I’ve been keeping things simple and figuring stuff out as I go, and I’ve had success relying heavily on a frame counter and scheduling animations with it, using easing equations (some standard, some custom) and a simple function for flickering. It’s a bit tedious when iterating as I’m still defining my parameters compile time, but animations come out much slicker, making it worth the cost.

However, I’ve been copying these functions and tools from file to file and, along with the inconsistent function interfaces, performance issues and other cruft, this week it just finally caught up to me. Prevailing prototyping advice may say not to care about code quality, but the unneeded complexity was inhibiting my ability to prototype. I’ve had to take a step back with my progress and standardize my tools and, making them into little libraries.

Other fun:

• Lorcan O’Shanahan, producer of some of the finest interfaces, found me through sciencefictioninterfaces.tumblr.com and I briefly got to talk to him over Twitter!