031 -- A Generative Landscape: An Ever-Changing Terrain (Due Mon 10/16)
Create a program which presents an ever-changing (generative) and imaginative "landscape". Populate your landscape with features that are suitable for your concept: perhaps trees, buildings, vehicles, animals, people, food items, body parts, hairs, zombies etc.
The landscape should move past the 'camera', but you can elect the manner by which it does so; for example, it might appear to scroll by (as if you were looking out the window of a train); or approach from a first-person point of view (as if you were driving), or slide underneath (as if you were looking out of a glass-bottomed airplane). The camera might be viewing an outside environment, or viewing objects on a conveyor belt, etc. If you are an advanced student, you may wish to experiment with the camera() command, which allows for the specification of moving cameras.
Give consideration to the depth of variation in your landscape: after how much time does your landscape become predictable? How might you extend this inevitability as much as possible? How can you make a landscape which is both consistent yet surprising? You may need to make a variety of different elements, and continually change how you clump them. Or perhaps these elements themselves are generative, and synthesized on-the-fly. Feel free to experiment with 3D (objects, terrains, etc), or mixtures of 2D & 3D.
Some concepts to consider: people/trees/architecture (The 3 basic psychological features of landscapes); foreground/middleground/background "layers"; variation at the macro scale + variation at the meso scale + variation at the micro scale. Some stuff to see: grass, route de nuit by alcys, etc.