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Robot 5: Media
Unlike the robots created from lines and rectangles drawn in
Processing in the previous chapters, these robots were created
with a vector drawing program. For some shapes, it’s often easier
to point and click in a software tool like Inkscape or Illustrator
than to define the shapes with coordinates in code.
There’s a trade-off to selecting one image creation technique
over another. When shapes are defined in Processing, there’s
more flexibility to modify them while the program is running. If
the shapes are defined elsewhere and then loaded into Processing,
changes are limited to the position, angle, and size. When
loading each robot from an SVG file, as this example shows, the
variations featured in Robot 2 (see “Robot 2: Variables” on page
47) are impossible.
Images can be loaded into a program to bring in visuals created
in other programs or captured with a camera. With this image in
the background, our robots are now exploring for life-forms in
Norway at the dawn of the 20th century.
The SVG and PNG files used in this example can be downloaded
from http://www.processing.org/learning/books/media.zip:
Media 101