Description

I wanted to create a simulation of skipping rocks on water. Depending on the rock skips (or jumps) along the water, the water ripples a certain amount of times, with each hit, around the rock’s point of contact. I wanted to randomly generating beautiful ripple effects to simulate the rock skipping experience.

Precedents and inspirations can be viewed in my project proposal.

Code

I ended up using vectors and classes to draw the ripples and rocks, respectively. I developed a Rock class in order to create instances of the rock and had to store the “skip” points, the point where the rock “bounces” on the water, as a vector of an ofPoint in order to be able to draw a ripple at that point. Below is the section of my code that contains the rock skips and ripple draw.

void testApp::update(){
     //if the rock is at a skip point, draw a ripple
     if (rocks[i].rockPosition.y >= rocks[i].skip.y) {
	   float width = 0;
	   w.push_back( width );
			
	   float height = 0;
	   h.push_back( height );
			
	   ofPoint pos;
	   pos.x = rocks[i].skip.x;
	   pos.y = rocks[i].skip.y;
	   startPositions.push_back( pos );
			
	   int opacity = 255;
	   o.push_back( opacity );		
     }
}

Download full source here.