Monthly Archives: April 2013

“Processing” course from Andrew Glassner

Processing” is a Java-based language that has many built-in 2D drawing functions. It gives you all sorts of artistic control of what’s put on the screen. Andrew Glassner is now teaching an online course all about it:

Course page

Even if you don’t sign up for the course, you owe it to yourself to visit just for the eye candy, both the works at the top and the video itself. “Processing” could be the worst name for a language ever (try Googling it, for example), but it also produces some of the most lovely results with just a few lines of code. I played with it – fun! It’s also a great first programming language for non-programmers.

This course costs actual money, and I’m betting it’s worth it. Andrew is one of the best computer graphics lecturers out there. He’s also a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to the quality of his presentations. He wrote a book about Processing, so knows his subject extremely well and knows how to teach it. Finally, as part of the class, he’ll (and this blows my mind) create a video each week for each student of expert, personalized feedback on their work. What?!

It’s sort of a funny thing to have MOOCs get most of the attention lately. Online courses that cost money have been around for some time. Paying money makes a certain sense from a commitment standpoint, both on the part of the student and the teacher. If you seriously want to learn Processing (and along with it, the principles of 2D modeling, rendering, and animation) and value your time, this looks like a great place to go.

Processing screenshot, from Wikipedia:

490 links for 70 days

I like to give 7 links for a day, but I’ve been busy the past half year or so with the interactive 3D graphics MOOC. In two days the second half of the course will roll out, and I’ll blab about that later (in, like, two days). In the meantime, here are 490 links for the half year I’ve been missing. Basically, it’s the Instructor Notes for a bunch of the lessons in the course, additional material and links relevant to the subjects. I admit it, there are a lot of weaksauce links in there, basics for beginners and pointers to Wikipedia this and that. But there are also some great things in there.

Hey, let’s turn this into 7 great links (use Chrome or Firefox to view them, or enable WebGL in Safari):

I know there are a bunch more links in the Instructor Notes that are worthwhile (things like the GLSL shader validator plug-in for Sublime Text 2), but these particular ones stuck with me.

I did get to visit the shrine one morning while in Mountain View recording:

“Game Development Tools 2” CFP

Marwan Ansari has put out a call for participation for “Game Development Tools 2”. Proposals are due July 1, for publication around SIGGRAPH 2014. Among other things, Marwan’s the author of some wonderful (old but still useful) comprehensive articles on GPU image processing, freely downloadable in the “ShaderX^2 Tips and Tricks book”.

You can use Amazon’s Look Inside feature to see some of the first book in the “Game Development Tools” series, and the demos for the first book are also available.