Resources | The Imaginary Institute

Resources

Imaginary Institute Technical Reports

I've written a series of technical reports that I hope you'll find useful. You can click on each one to download it in PDF format. Tech Reports 1 and 2 talk about useful ideas for programming in Processing. Tech Report 3 is an overview of my AU Library (see above to download it), and Tech Reports 4 through 8 talk about different topics that often crop up when programming, and how to use the AU Library to address them.

1: Solving Geometry: How to solve and program the kinds of geometry problems that often crop up when writing Processing sketches.
2: Trig for Computer Graphics: What the basic trig functions do, and how they provide us with really useful information for making animated and interactive programs.
3: The AU Library: The overview document for the AU Library. If you read nothing else about the AU Library, read this! The other reports for the library, listed below, discuss the motivation for the major pieces of the library, and provides discussion and examples for their use.
4: Blending and Easing: How to make your moving objects appear to move gracefully, and (when you want it), realistically.
5: Waves: A library of many useful waves and curve shapes for modeling and animation.
6: Measuring Distances: How to measure and compute distances in a variety of useful and interesting ways. By using this section of the library, you can freely change the size of your graphics window and your sketch will naturally scale up and down.
7: Fields and Cameras: How to use my implementations of 2D arrays of floats to represent grayscale images, color images, and any other data you might want to storein a grid. It also shows you how to easily create and use a camera object so that you can produce animations that look really nice, thanks to built-in motion blur.
8: Equal Spacing Along Curves: How to use two objects that let you find evenly-spaced points along curves of any number of points. You can also interpolate arbitrary amounts of your own data. Everything comes out seamless and smooth.
9: Quick Reference: A collection of all the AU Library objects, functions, and constants in one place for handy reference.
10: Interpreting Alpha: Everyone uses alpha values to composite images, but what does alpha really describe? Some authors treat it as a color's opacity, others as a pixel's coverage. Most people go back and forth between the two. How can that be right? In this note we look closely at alpha and see what it really represents.
11: Globs: How to create really cool, smoothly-blended shapes between two circles or spheres.
12: Wrap - A Practical Replament for Modulo: A version of the modulo operator that's more useful for programming.