Darren Mothersele

Software Developer


Nature of openFrameworks (part 1)

Oct 11, 2013


The excellent, self-published, book The Nature of Code by Daniel Shiffman gives a solid foundation for understanding the mathematical principles behind our physical world. There are loads of great examples that show programming techniques for simulating the natural world in code.

The book is written to target Processing, a popular Java based creative coding framework. Because I prefer C++, and in order to familiarise myself more with openFrameworks, I’ve been converting some of the examples to work in openFrameworks. Here are some of the early examples, I may post more, but I’ve started looking at Cinder too, so in future I may convert some examples to Cinder instead.

Click each title to access the code on Gist:

Random Walker

This is the first example from the introduction. It just moves a point around the screen randomly. There is no point() method in openFrameworks so to draw a single pixel we just draw a 1x1 rectangle.

The App class just needs a variable to store an instance of the Walker:

The step() and display() methods are both called from within Processing’s draw loop, but in openFrameworks we use the update() method to update state separately from the draw loop.

Finally, the main file to launch the openFrameworks app.

Random number distribution

This example shows how random numbers are evenly distributed.

There’s no method for finding the array length in C++ so we hard code the length of the array used to store the count of the generated random numbers. You can find the length of a simple array (not an array of pointers) using the sizeof() function, by dividing the size of the array by the size of each element, like this: (sizeof(a)/sizeof(*a)) or preferably use a container class like std::vector which will be covered later.

Gaussian distribution

In Processing you have to clear the screen each time in the draw loop, but openFrameworks does this for you by default. To disable this you add a call to ofSetBackgroundAuto(false) in setup. To create the alpha background effect I draw a rectangle over the whole screen area. Here’s a version that uses a complete random distribution:

And here is a version using a Gaussian distribution. openFrameworks doesn’t have the Gaussian function is in the Random utility class in Processing, so we have to specify a function to calculate the next Gaussian number:

Custom distribution (Monte Carlo)

Here’s an example that demonstrates a custom distribution.

Perlin Noise

ofNoise is the openFrameworks equivalent of Processing’s noise() function. It returns a float between 0 and 1. openFrameworks also has an equivalent of map function (ofMap) that maps the noise value (which is 0 - 1) to the range 0 - height.