For this assignment, I had initially planned to create Agar Plate V2, but quickly found out that there would be very few ways to add more features and convert it to follow the guidelines of OOP without overhauling some major parts, so I decided to start from scratch. The bouncing balls example we did in class inspired me to do a project on generative art using ants.
Fig.: A column of ants, hard at work carrying food back to their colony
The patterns formed by scout ants searching for food and then leading worker ants to the food using pheromones always fascinated me. I wanted to replicate something along those lines in a generative art project. Because this was generative art, most of it had to involve randomness in initial positions, direction, and motions. I first got to work to converting the bouncing balls to ants. For this, I also converted my simple speedX and speedY parameters to be calculated from polar coordinates instead. The hope was that using angles instead of plain coordinate directions would allow better control over the behavior when reflecting off surfaces. I also finally figured out how to set up the collision between two objects in p5.js, which I implemented as below:
collide(other) {
var d = dist(this.x, this.y, other.x, other.y);
if (d < this.rad + other.rad) {
return true;
} else {
return false;
}
}
for (var j = 0; j < ants.length; j++) {
if (i != j && ants[i].collide(ants[j]) && !(ants[i].collide(colony))) {
ants[i].speedDir += PI/2;
ants[j].speedDir += PI/2;
}
}
I was initially having the ants go in opposite directions when they met, but decided that having them bounce off 90 degrees instead better matched the behavior of real ants, who often exchange information about the presence or lack of food along their already searched path and move off in different directions instead.
This is the final result:
Finally, I decided to add a bit of randomness to the motion to avoid having them go in exact straight lines and be a closer match to ant-like motion.
Overall, there are many more things that I wanted to include in this project, but figuring out direction and the p5.js rotate() function took the bulk of my time. I had initially planned to have user interactivity in the form of sugar cubes they could drop, which would cause all the ants nearby to rush towards it. But, I had already tired of the math required just to figure out which direction the ants would be oriented in when they bounced off the walls, and I wasn’t too eager for further math. If I have more time in the future, I would love to revisit this project and improve upon it.