I borrowed Samuel Bravo Silva’s excellent “cylinder_tree” sketch and ported it to my native GL framework (called CBGameworks, soon to be released). Download Octopus.zip (51KB) (seen above). Keys ESDF move the camera. R peds upward. L toggles lighting, off by default.
Source code (73KB) is available for download, bundled with an undocumented and symbol-stripped version of my CBGameworks library.
It’s truly amazing what Ben Fry’s little framework has done to the demo scene in the past two years. Despite having made no real technical achievement, Processing has become the de-facto engine for interactive art — exhibiting itself in galleries, on magazine covers, and all over the internet. Its success lies in its simplicity, its elegance — the shared value among artists and programmers that connects both sides of the brain. And while it’s true that more powerful tools are available, nothing else comes with such a clear methodology, extensible design, and fanatical community.
Check out the processing group on Vimeo. Stunning. The top two producers, in my opinion, are Marius Watz (watz) and Robert Hodgin (flight404) of The Barbarian Group.