ICM 15.0 FINAL

Wow, I have been very skippy with my blog posts, I just realized! And today I bring the last blog post for the ICM class.

It's crazy how the semester has flown so fast! One quarter of my time at ITP is now gone.

And now.. for my ICM final, I bring a 3D Random Walker I worked on in P5.

Well, 2 week project to be a final, but while I was brainstorming I looked back at some of my posts and realized that I was very fond of the random walker project I did in the first half of the semester.

So I backtracked, and went back to bring this into 3D.

And this is the initial first stage where I landed.

With the 2D random walk, I only needed to worry about the x and y axis. But with the depth Z added, I knew I had to add random options to the Z axis as well.

Then, to view the 3D walk more clearly, I added rotations to the sketch so I can view the 3D aspect of it more. Then that's where I landed with this spiral work.

Then, I wanted to make the green blob look prettier. So I played around a little with the color. It was interesting how there was like a motion blur effect due to the rotation.

Then, I tried to create a sketch with a very ideal random walk look. This was a little tricky because depending on the camera movement and angle, things shifted so drastically.

This seemed closer to what I wanted, but this only worked when the camera was not moving (or more so when there was no rotation.)

(At this stage I kept the background() function in the setup() not draw() and was faking a random walk, or more so using an unhealthy way to achieve what I want.)

v this is a pretty screenshot I took during the process

And with this I was trying to inspect what's going on by making a box separately from the random walk. It seemed like it's working fine, but something small was off. I couldn't figure out what it was.

Tried to be more specific with the trouble shooting and inspection. I brought back the stroke to see if I've missed anything. Not much information from this try though.

So I went back and started thinking.

While I was thinking, I wanted to make it pretty. And I liked the idea that we were in 3D, and I wanted to alter the values in lights. So I changed the color of the light to a redish pink. I was happeeee with the result.

Then, I liked the look and wanted more control. This is when I landed with my first sketch. Although it wasn't where I wanted to land at the end of the day, it was working, and I found that fun.

Then like a natural next step, I added controls for the RGB values of the light.

Knobs!

And then I was satisfied with where I was. Not enough to finish and wrap up, but to version up.

So this is where I landed with my first sketch:

So after I saved this version, then I turned to ChatGPT. It seemed like I couldn't make this work alone.

So I asked it to help me with the perspective control using the mouse. Then, I slowly realized that that wasn't the issue, but it was more of something about the background and having the geo propagate from stage 0.

That ringed a bell, finally. I realized that it was an issue with arrays. I, in concept, understood that I needed to store the data of the boxes that progressed randomly in position, and needed to have that be stored and the next box being overlapped on top of that. So I asked ChatGPT again.

And THAT is when I got the result I want.

The boxes were now stored in an array (Thank yuo ChatGPT)

And my 3D random walk is working.