My initial idea was to replace the random point generator with some pictures of my personal stuff, such as my favorite makeup, favorite boots, favorite headphones, etc. So whenever a bang is sent, a bunch of small pictures would drop and I could push them aside on the screen using gestures. After talking with Kyria during office hour, I realized there was no easy way around this, the points would always remain as points. I then started thinking of ways to integrate the patcher Professor Rosenstock demonstrated in class with the Computer Vision template patchers.
Immediately an amazing idea came to my mind – the little spheres resemble capsule toys so much! And what better ways to represent my childhood than a bunch of capsule toys encapsulating my favorite anime from the early 2000s?
I initially wanted to dynamically generate the spheres using gestures but I think there was no way to do that – even the official tutorials by Max do not necessarily make objects suddenly appear from nowhere with a bang. I was thinking about setting the default scale to almost invisible in order to fake the appearance but for some reason the scale of the spheres could not be set to less than 0.1 and that was clearly visible. In the end, there really wasn’t any better solution than to use mesh as the default and switch the form with a bang later.
There is also some problem with the CV patcher I was using. Certain buttons were extremely difficult to trigger while the others were “too” easy to trigger. Therefore, I only included 4 sound files in the patcher because I knew other buttons were way too sensitive even though I changed the sensitivity setting already. As you can see from the video, in the end I just gave up and clicked some of the buttons manually as they were almost impossible to be triggered with my own motion.
Overall I am super happy with how this turned out – searching the pictures and songs of these anime from my childhood brought me back to many many years ago when I was still a little child. There was no pressure from applying for jobs, maintaining a high GPA, or paying off student loans.
I’m sorry to see that the original YuGiOh animated series wasn’t a part of your childhood 😥. This is quite the endearing project; makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside, especially since capsule toys were also part of my childhood. To address your problem of spawning the balls, there is a “visible” property on many Jitter objects and I’m pretty sure you could have hidden them and then revealed them with movement.
I really liked your idea of the capsules with the anime and shows. Though, I have to admit, while I recognized most them, I only actually ever watched the Teletubbies. My exposure to anime and shows was quite stunted when I was little. It’s still a great idea, though. I especially like the music that plays with their appearances.
I suggest deleting the object that shows the grids. It’s useful for navigating in the window, but it’ll show the objects even if they’re invisible. Turning off the draw will make them completely invisible.
I think you made a wonderful way of demonstrating who you are! Like I said in class the other day, I really like the capsule image you have in the background, but I think you should consider erasing the balls inside the machine so that way the image isn’t too crowded.
This could be a really cool social profile app. Everyone has their toy machines with toys and memories from their childhood. and other people could see each others toy machines, and play with their toys. Your max patch looks great… 🙂