I've gotten into Processing over a year ago and have been trying to create visual programs (the ole generative music reactive type program) and have only come up with very simple effects.

I want to learn advanced techniques for visual programming and generative art, but haven't had much luck on my own. I am a CS major at university now, but the program is geared more towards making me into a cubical monkey working on enterprise crap; no creative outlets whatsoever.

I've taken a look at the books listed in the Books section of the site and haven't bought any; I already know what I need to know about programming and how languages work ad whatnot, what I'm looking for is topics such as boids, flow fields, fluid dynamics, effecient particle systems and force interactions, etc.

Basically I'm another nerd who was/is greatly inspired by Robert Hodgin of Flight404 as well as others, and I very much want to start learning some of the advanced techniques that can be found in his work. Again, I've been programming for years so I know HOW to program, but I so far haven't learned much about programming what I WANT to program.

Thanks!

Hey, thanks for the link. I remember seeing it before, but I didn't realize how much stuff as actually in the sections headers.

Thanks to this I learned about boids and flowfields, enough to create a 3D flow field and then, last night, a spherical flow field with boids. Great site!

We just received a copy of "Finding form" by Frei Otto & Bodo Rasch
Very inspiring.  A must-have if you are interested into natural structures.

ira's processing book is pretty nice. so is the reas & fry book. both are worth purchasing.

flight404's work is more java openGL stuff (although he's now moved into c++). you can find a lot of his old source code by working backwards through his blog, or looking at his older websites. (he published a lot more of his source then...)

w:blut publishes his sources.

casey reas publishes his sources.

golan levin (c++).

scott draves (c++).

dave bollinger.

jared tarbell.

of course, ben fry. and toxic.

also, karl sims, jon mccormack, william latham, & philip galanter for ideas on 3d generative art. the inestimable Paul Bourke.

brandon morse, kenneth huff, richard galpin, the synchronousobjects project,

'The Computational Beauty of Nature' for a nice overview on different "generative systems".

Metacreation by Whitelaw.

Evolutionary Art and Computers (out of print but still available on amazon-used)

Creative Evolutionary Systems (plus the CD)

theres more, but these are off the top of my head.

also, check out openFrameworks, vvvv, and StructureSynth for different kinds of real-time generative art software frameworks besides processing...

generative.net & runme.org

gen-art papers by florian cramer, alexie shulgin, and inke arne.

thats all off the top of my head...(foxmarks helped).

theres more - but that should get you started...

good luck.

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