Sunday, September 23, 2012

DSDN 142: Creating The Radial Gradient

This is the next section on my list of things to do for my coding project. The radial gradient development for the solar entities. This was definitely one of the hardest things so far. The nested for loops making up a function that wrote the circles creating the illusion of a gradient is rather cool, but might not be the best way of doing things.

I also managed to significantly advance it from what I had in lesson, so that now the location of it is linked to the mouseX and mouseY values. This allows me to move and manipulate the sun on the fly. I have the sun set to expand and brighten the longer the mouse is held down, with the effect slowing down the larger the sun gets.


However, being me, I wasn't satisfied with this result. It just really doesn't get across the effect that I really want to achieve, so I continued developing the code. Since at present my work is rather stylised, I decided I should stick with that current track record and continue onwards to make the solar entities even more awesome looking. 


Having the banded gradation actually makes them look far more awesome. I really like this look, but it still feels like it's lacking somehow. Not sure how.


This is immediately so much better. The actual central light makes it feel like a sun caught in some sort of foreign nebula. Having a bright point at the centre just makes sense too, and having the central point get slowly larger while the bands for the gradient move outwards with the mousepress makes this a very dynamic entity.

Now I just need to make them part of an array!

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