This week was the start of two courses (Creative Coding on Futurelearn and Creative Programming for Digital Media & Mobile Apps on Coursera.org about creative programming in Processing) and I blogged about them in my main blog. Since I have already done some of the assignments some time ago, I focused on some things that I knew about, but did not do so far.
Creating gifs
There are basically two simple ways to create gifs from Processing sketches (that’s what the single programs are called in the Processing world) and both are explained by Jerome Herr on his Tumblr:
- Save single frame images and combine them later with other tools or
- use a library that creates the gif while the program is running.
I tried both and both worked fine, at least in part. I was able to install gifsicle, but it would not run properly so I did what anyone would do who already has some experience with ImageMagick, I used the usual convert to do the trick.
I will need some more tries to determine, which method to use more because they seem to have different effects on the speed of execution of the sketches. This doesn’t really matter, when the animations are generated by code alone, because the framerate will be the same for the exection as for the gif, but it produces much different output when human interaction is part of the sketch.
So probably there will be more here about Processing in the near future. By the way, the mentioned Tumblr from Jerome also has a nice list of learning ressources for Processing.