reflection

This project was really fun as a concept but, in practice, really time-consuming. It got me really looking forward to learning more about how to simplify code.

My three sketches were the butterfly life cycle, the fly life cycle, and growing out roots. I thought I would do the fly life cycle since it seemed easy, but when I started coding, I was more inclined to do the prettier aesthetics of a butterfly cycle. The clock is novel to me in that I knew of the cycle shallowly (I knew the order) but did not know the exact amount of time the butterfly spent at each stage.

I started with the non-mobile: the light blue background, leaf, stem, egg, chryssalis. Then I added did a lil research about the butterfly life cycle to make the clock as proportionally accurate as possible. I used the average life cycles of a few different butterfly species, then scaled it to 30 second intervals so that my animation would cycle twice in 60 seconds.

I then used the if (second()) code to make the egg and chrysallis appear during the seconds that I had calculated. Next, I moved onto the caterpillar. I had to code each component of the caterpillar separetely and keep adjusting so that they lined up without too much space or too much overlap. It took a while because there was a lot of adjusting small increments and waiting for the caterpillar part of the cycle to play. While watching the second loop, I realized the caterpillar's size and position weren't resetting so I had to play around with the code to fix it. Eventually I settled with an if() then() code to reset the caterpillar's size and position during the time it was not playing.

Next, I coded the butterfly. I created a non-moving butterfly and thought the clock was not very fun -- and also not very clock-like. So, I coded the circling sun to add more movement into my sketch. Since the sun was circling, I thought of sunrise and sunset and wanted to code a day/night transitioning background. I found fading code online from a fading text sketch and reworked it to do what I needed. I added a dark blue fading square across the whole canvas. Since I am not totally sure what the code exactly means, I couldn't make it perfectly fit my sketch. After a few loops, you can notice the day and night transitions do not match the circling sun.

Since my caterpillar moves, I was not satisfied with the immobile butterfly. Thus, I added random() to the wing shape size to and the body to make it look like the butterfly is fluttering.

Overall, the end result of the project is really fun to watch, but I don't think it will alter the way I tell time. I am excited to learn more about simplifying the code / learning about ways that will make the code shorter since I had to individually code each line and shape and coordinate them.