I wasn't really sure what to name this project, but P(rocessing)Mesh sounded about right. I saw a post on r/processing that had a grid of rectangles. Each rectangle would expand depending on its distance from the cursor. I first saw this post at 2AM and my brain was not powerful enough to comprehend what I was watching, so I figured I would try to code it up the following day. Turned out to be a cool little project!

Anyway, I decided to name my grid a PMesh. Each row of rectangles is called a Chain, and each rectange within a row is called a Link. I went with this naming convention because the final result sort of reminded me of chainmail, since the size of one rectangle would affect the positions of the other rectangles in the grid, kind of like how the contraction / expansion of one link in a chainmail will affect the positions of other links.

As a slight modification to the original Reddit post, I made each Link contract rather than expand as the mouse gets closer to it. I also added a slight alpha-gradient to the Links' color. This way, Links look kind of transparent when the mouse is far from them, but become fully opaque as the mouse gets closer to them.

To run this code, you'll have to install the Processing IDE. From there, you can just clone this repository with git clone https://github.com/rshiv2/PMesh.git and run the code. I've left some parameters in PMesh.pde for users to play around with. Hopefully the comments I've left will provide a good idea of what each of these parameters does!