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Let the fun begin! I suspect many of you have been waiting patiently (or not so patiently) for this chapter. It took a certain restraint on my part to not start flying pixels around thescreen back in Chapter I. Animation and motion design is usually what gets my students hooked on codingmand even to embrace trigonometry. This chapter, we’ll explore all kinds of neat motion (including some trig), from deflecting to bouncing to easing to springing. You’ll even create an asteroid shower and [earn how to code all sorts of interesting collisions.

One of the most compelling aspects of digital/code art is interactivity. Interactive art is not in itself a completely new concept—for example, we’ve all become quite accustomed to “please touch” type children’s museums. However, what is unique in code art is the fact that users can not only interact with a work of art, but in some cases they can actually redefine it, or even use the piece of art to create their own original works of art. Mark Napier’s piece () is an excellent example of this. Viewers use Napier’s web-based piece to design a flag of the entire Internet. Their creation remains the current flag of the Net until another viewer changes it. Each of the flags created also gets put into a permanent viewable database. Napier’s piece—and others like it—represents a radical break with the established view of a work of art as contemplative object/space. Instead, in the case of , the work of art almost disappears, becoming a dynamic tool that others can use to express themselves.

The term describes a psychological state in which people are attracted to and also repulsed by something. This tension aptly describes the relationship many of my past art students had with 3D animation. On the one hand, they were enamored by the cool 3D effects they watched in their favorite games and films. On the other hand, they became easily frustrated trying to learn the extremely dense and unintuitive software. Popular 3D modeling and animation applications such as LightWave, Maya, and 3ds Max (which handle the coding behind the scenes) are extremely complex, specialized pieces of software, presenting steep, drawn-out learning curves. Attempting to teach these same art students 3D programming would have been unthinkable. For this reason, coding 3D has been the domain of computer science types, requiring lots of scary math and very low-level programming—that is, until Processing came along. Processing has full 3D support and even includes two separate 3D renderers, and of course it’s free. Most importantly. Processing greatly simplifies the process of coding 3D for creative folks, allowing us to begin “creating” in 3D almost immediately.