Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ubavic 1635 days ago
I always wanted to start with generative art and this seems like a perfect starting place.

Question for people that already do generative art: what library (framework) do you recommend? I know a little bit about GLSL but I know it is limiting in some cases

3 comments

If Rust's your language, I wrote a library that should be pretty good at 2D things: https://github.com/logicalshift/flo_draw - I wrote it while working on another project (FlowBetween) where I found debugging would be easier if I could just render something on-screen but rendering stuff on screen always required a ridiculous amount of setup.

It has some nice options for feeding its own output back into itself as it uses streams rather than callbacks so it's quite good for procedural rendering type tasks (the 'Wibble' example is a good place to start with that)

p5 is great! Very easy to learn and has an amazing online editor to get you started immediately. Such a good tool for prototyping ideas quickly.

https://editor.p5js.org/

I second p5js. Try Dan Shifman's "The Coding Train" videos on youtube.
I third recommend p5js. If you're looking for more different flavors, try the Awesome Creative Coding page on github to get your bearings.

- https://github.com/terkelg/awesome-creative-coding

If you'd rather do visual programming than code, blender is a great choice. You can do generative 2D using the shader node editor, or 3D with the new geometry nodes.

For a code-based approach, I spent the weekend trying different permutations of Processing and settled on writing p5.js in VSCode. It's easy to set up, you can use vim bindings, and you can copy+paste your code into openprocessing.org if you want to share it (if it's interactive, for example).