Processing Creative Coding and Computational Art

13 3D

The term approach-avoidance describes a psychological state in which people are attracted to and also repulsed by something. This tension aptly describes the relationship many of my past art students had with 3D animation. On the one hand, they were enamored by the cool 3D effects they watched in their favorite games and films. On the other hand, they became easily frustrated trying to learn the extremely dense and unintuitive software. Popular 3D modeling and animation applications such as LightWave, Maya, and 3ds Max (which handle the coding behind the scenes) are extremely complex, specialized pieces of software, presenting steep, drawn-out learning curves. Attempting to teach these same art students 3D programming would have been unthinkable. ...