I worked on this project in combination with another class - Biophilic Experiences (2 credit) which ended last Friday. I wanted to take the flocking simulation we learnt from the textbook and apply it to the movement of fish. Since I was also exploring a similar theme in another class for Projection in DUMBO, where we’re depicting birds, I am taking inspiration from the proces used there to essentially draw frames of animation and loop through them as a spritesheet.
I started off from this paper on Nature - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-024-03348-3
that had data for the number of spawning regions of fish organised by continent and commercial group. Dataset - https://github.com/openmodels/spawning-dataset (CC-BY-NC 4.0)
Number of spawning regions by continent and commercial group. Continent definitions are drawn from Natural Earth. “Multiple continents” indicates that the spawning region record is located across two continents or more (such as the Mediterranean Sea) and can include the high seas. Records in the “Other islands” category are located in island groups outside of Oceania and not in close proximity to a continent. - From https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-024-03348-3
From here, I wanted to represent the movement of fish, and abstract away the data into a more experiential takeaway.
I chose to base the movement on the flocking example in the textbook - https://natureofcode.com/
https://editor.p5js.org/sairamved/full/MUOrfgvpq
I then set out to create sprites for each of the commercial groups of fish. I started off with a sprite pack published by avodhel - https://opengameart.org/content/sea-world-pack (CC0), and used it as reference to make simpler sprites with a color palette that fit my needs.
The sprite pack I crafted also acted as a good legend for the visualisation itself, with instructions on how to navigate through the data, through the different continents -
