Processing: Creative Coding and Computational Art

The overall movement was good, but the tree seemed too stiff, so I wrote a little redrawing
function that added some waviness to the main trunk, and I set this up as a random
value. Using randomness is really helpful for generating organic-esque type effects. One of
the potential pitfalls of using code as a creative medium is its inherent precision, since it’s
ultimately based on math. In the real world, “stuff” (friction, gravity, our ineptitude, etc.)
intervenes between intention and implementation—the happy accidents. Adding randomness
is one (easy) way to introduce some happy chaos into an otherwise highly predictable
process (see Figure 2-6). Normally when I use random values, I set a base number that I
add to the random part. For example, if I were creating a random number of branches,
and I used a random function, such as random(12), I would get a number returned
between 0 and 12. However, if I needed a minimum of two branches, I would change the
expression to “2+random(10)”—this way, I would get a random number between 2 and 12.
Processing has a handy random function that allows you to pass two arguments, as in
random(2, 12), which does the same thing.
Figure 2-6. Waviness added to the main trunk
Things were beginning to look pretty good, but I still needed to deal with those darn
leaves. Then, a really happy coding accident happened. As I began to play with the code,
setting weird numbers in the functions, I found a way of generating leaves by really upping
the number of iterations and using a couple of conditional statements (if and else) that
would at specific times in the branch-creation cycle decrement or increment certain values.
Then I added some color the same way, and finally used a similar wavy function for
each branch, like I used on the trunk. Figure 2-7 shows a couple of finished trees.
CREATIVE CODING
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