As most of you know by now, I have been using a C++ framework called Cinder. It was created by Andrew Bell and The Barbarian Group. Last week, it was released to the public as an open source project.

With some help from Mike Creighton and Andrew Bell, I wrote a welcome to Cinder tutorial. It is a five chapter guide for getting started with Cinder. It highlights some of Cinder’s features and walks the reader through how to create the stippling project I posted a couple months back.

Source Code!

Included with the Cinder download are a bunch of sample projects to get you started. I haven’t been that good about releasing source code so hopefully I can make up for it now. The source for the following three projects are included in the samples folder.

Flint Ball (In the samples folder, it is called HodginParticlesRedux)

Earthquake!

Reaction Diffusion (using GLSL shaders) inspired by Toxi’s amazing work with RD

Fluid

Also, Andrew just finished porting Memo Akten’s MSAFluid library which is a rather lovely 2D fluid simulator. I used it to create a couple videos which use MSAFluid and a particle engine. Particles are deposited into the fluid and cause the fluid to move. The moving fluid then influences the movement of the particles creating a feedback loop. It ended up creating some nice examples of self-sustaining turbulence.

So there you have it. I am really excited to see Cinder out in the world. Check out the features and browse the projects in the gallery. If you have any questions or issues or compliments or suggestions, you can voice them in the forum. Happy coding!