Shape Shifting Dinosaur

Design Process.

For the first part of my assignment, I drew four different colored godzilla-type-dragons in different sizes- small, large, stretched out horizontally, and vertically. While creating this was easy in Adobe Illustrator, translating into code was a little difficult. Through what we learned during class and tutorials during the previous week, I was able to create the dragon using 2D primitive shapes. I also made it so that the dragon’s color changes depending on where the mouseX, and mouseY are located. Initially, I was going to stop here since I achieved the drawing I made on Illustrator. However, I wanted to make the dragon blow out fire from its mouth, so I created fire from triangular shapes. For the color, I assigned a variable (fireCol), and used this variable along with the mousePressed() and random() function to make the dragon change colors (different shades of orange and yellow) whenever the mouse was pressed. On top of the random colors, I made it so that it would change the size as well, using scale(). With the help from my DT Study tutor, Bex, I was able to place a boundary on the dragon, so that the dragon would stay within the 400x400 frame (the boundary was placed on the fire. The fire will always be within the frame, while the dragon will go partially out of bound).

What have you discovered about the form you've chosen through this assignment?

I realized I made my form a little too complicated since there were a lot of shapes I had to create in order to make it look like what I initially sketched out. Through my DT Study tutoring session, I was able to figure out how the rotate function works as well as how to set boundaries to my sketch to stay within the 400x400 grid! I also discovered that there are specific functions that are helpful for each 2D primitive shape (ex: rectMode(CENTER)), and I have to figure out which functions to use to make coding more efficient and less time consuming.