By femdev on Skatehive
Learn Creative Coding (#13) - Trigonometry for Artists Math class made trig feel like punishment. SOH-CAH-TOA, word problems about ladders against walls, test anxiety. Forget all of that. In creative coding, trigonometry is a drawing tool. Possibly the most powerful drawing tool you'll ever learn. It turns angles into curves, circles into spirals, and simple parameters into endlessly varied organic forms. Every circular pattern, every spiral, every oscillation, every wave, every mandala, every pulsing animation you've ever seen in creative coding? Trig. It's all trig. Once you internalize the core formula -- and it really is just one core formula -- an entire universe of visual possibilities opens up. I'm not exaggerating. This episode changed how I think about code-as-art more than any other :-) Polar coordinates: the one formula We've been working in cartesian coordinates since episode 9: (x, y), a grid. But there's another way to describe a point in space: with an angle and a distan