Hi everyone.  I have a project idea for a generative sketch to manipulate typography.  Here's a quick outline:

• Start wth a vine trailing up from the bottom of the screen
• Each vine sprouts word leaves, and each vine holds an entire sentence of leaves
• The camera is tracking back from the shot as more vines are born around it
• The camera moves back slowly enough so you can read the sentence before it slowly fades to background shades

• Suddenly buildings are constructed around the vines, crushing them and breaking them to pieces
• The buildings consist of word bricks falling from the sky, tetris-like
• Each brick falls into its designated space, sometimes missing or landing on an edge and creating broken/unstable buildings
• Each building forms an entire sentence from the bricks
• Bricks that fall away from the building also destroy the surround vines

Here's a quick visual:
So, my idea is to use a combination of libraries:

• Toxi's vec3D/AABB library for location/velocity/collision detection
• Ricard's Geomerative library for smooth vines, control over beziers and vector letter outlines
• Traer's physics library for organic motion of bezier control points (including gravity based on leaf size, angle etc) and for control over bricks and brick collision

My only trouble at the moment is getting the examples from Geomerative and Traer's physics to work.  Some examples work perfectly, others return various errors, and I'm starting to wonder if there are more recent libraries that have superseded these or if I need to start filing bugs?  I'd rather run the most recent version of Processing (I'm running 0157) and I'd rather the libraries work flawlessly on all platforms (though I'll be primarily running this in Linux).

I realise this is a tall order, so maybe I should start by asking: what would you use to create this sketch?

The visual was just a quick example sketched in Inkscape.  I'm a little further along with the sketch now, so I should really post an update...

Well, I've used toxi's geomutils library (for the Vec3D stuff) and traer's physics library.  Unfortunately, I couldn't use the Geomerative library or NextText to create the word leaves, as both libraries couldn't be rendered in opengl.

Instead, I cheated and created all the words as textures using bash and Imagemagick.

The current state of the project is two sketches.  This sketch grows vines from the floor, with each vine stem becoming wider in diameter as the vine ages.  The camera slowly tracks away from the generated vines.



The other sketch generates random leaves using a random word texture.



I intend to publish the code on openprocessing once it's in a more accessible format(!) but if you'd like a sample, let me know and I'll upload it to my dropbox.

At the moment, I can't seem to get the vines to produce offshoots in order to produce the leaves (it's something to do with a function I used to create the vine skin, so I have the equation somewhere!).

I'm also wanting to add a control panel to the bottom of the screen in order to control the vine's growth (speed, acceleration, direction etc) but am having trouble finding a way to either a) render controlP5 elements to a GLTexture then map to a quad, or b) create openGL native text to create the buttons/switches/output.

Any help in that department would be appreciated, especially if there's a way to get controlP5 working without slowing down my openGL sketch.

have you got links to the toxitraer.physics.*; codeanticode.glgraphics.*;

libraries?

lastParticle.kill();
// the function kill() doesn't exist //

Thanks in advance!