For the third study, I wanted to explore the idea of creating polygons using the mouse/trackpad for input. To do this I used the lcd object, as it provides mouse information from its outlets. From this, I was able to make a click detector that sent the xy coordinates of a mouse click through a message. From there I could store the last 3 clicks in order to send them to a paintpoly message then sent to the lcd.  There isn’t too much going on conceptually in this piece, I just wanted to make something that was a bit of fun to play around with, flashing colours and music tend to do that pretty well.

After getting this working I thought I should add a bit of motion, to do this I used a music input to control some randomisation. The hardest part of doing this was probably getting the 3 polygons (to cycle between) storing correctly. I had some issues where the messages weren’t storing the coordinates properly. This is mostly fixed now, however one point usually is shared between all three polygons. Part of the issue was the ‘right to left’ order of operations. Funnily enough, after spending quite a while troubleshooting, I moved 2 objects a few pixels to the left which fixed the main problem I was having. Other than that, I didn’t really encounter too many other big issues during this study.

I decided to randomise a few other attributes, which worked out nicely. I would love to explore using patterns as well as polygons in my future studies.

Download the Max Patch here.