Recently, I've been experimenting with creating simple animations by prompting ChatGPT to create an HTML file with self-contained logic.
Here's a screenshot from an early version. The "seagrass" waves gently in the moving water, the lighting changes subtly, bubbles rise from the sea floor, eels and goldfish swim by, largely hidden in the grass. Every so often, a rapidly moving bright red eel-shaped fish darts through, visibly disturbing the grass. It has a sound option, the bubbles make soft pops and there's a background shooshing sounds.
A second (rewritten) version experimented with seasonal changes, involving changes in lighting and height of the seagrass over time, and a higher population of randomly-arriving critters. It also included an experiment comparing using the CPU vs using the GPU on my Mac. I assumed that the GPU would use less energy and that turned out to be a correct assumption.
Yesterday, I tried getting ChatGPT to make a moving visualization of a sky with moving clouds and backlight, with an option for background random "music".
This experiment proved to be difficult and I finally figured out that I should not have been so ambitious. My instructions assumed generation of clouds at the pixel level, which overloaded the CPU. What ended up working nicely was a "sprite-based" approach, where the cloud shapes were pre-defined in the code, mapped onto moving layers and modified in appearance mid-flight.
I was pleased with this, the intended relaxing appearance met my expectations. The "music" is a disappointment though.
The menu UI elements can be invoked by click or keystroke, and may be hidden.
Here's the first of the many prompts in this fun journey...
Let's noodle on some graphical ideas. I'm thinking of a web page which creates a softly-moving, evolving passage of clouds which gently change size and show the appearance of color change through evolving backlighting colors and intensity. The sky is also slowly evolving in saturation and darkness. The shapes are fractal in nature and indeed look naturally fractal. The mood is relaxing and there is a soft slow "music" playing. Later on, we can get to writing a software specification for this web app, but for now, let's let the creative juices flow........
