Circles circles everywhere (and lines and boxes too)

26 March to 1 April 2017 has been RYGBMCKO’s most productive week yet. In a couple of weeks when this goes up onto YouTube, you will be able to identify this week’s little segments by things getting very circle-based.

And this week I actually have a minute to talk shop and post some node setups and related screenies. Amazing!

Here is one of the variations of node setup which I use for plotting a circle. For input it takes a range of integers (the values don’t matter, just the size of the range), and it can create a set of points with different radiuses at different offsets around the circle and follow different objects. (obSize, hide and elementAngle are all left over from old versions of the group.)

I started using Animation Nodes for procedural geometry as well as animation this week. Up until now I’d been duplicating objects but not actually making them. The geometry workflow isn’t super obvious but the AN documentation is pretty good. Here’s a loop that draws lines (including a random factor) and its output points to a generated object.

Take the circle values and run them through the line drawing loop, add a colourful material, and get colourful space tinsel!

Or how about a little heartrate monitor?

For this I created a sawtooth wave that synchronises to the 12 frame beat.

I fed this into an Animation Nodes group to get a vertical offset value. Here’s how Inigo Quilez’s impulse function looks as an AN node group:

I duplicated the blobs with slightly lagged inputs to form a trail, put some glow on it and there we go.

Finally, one of four mandala thingies I made on Sunday alone. Here’s the node setup. It looks complicated but it is super repetitious.

There’s three or four objects being fed into the ringmaker loop. The ringmaker arranges stuff in circles around a reference object with a particular radius, making the objects a particular size, etc. The differences and variations come in the size of the circles, how fast they’re moving around the circle and in what direction, and whether either of those things are changing over the course of the shot.

And this is the output.

Today was the original release day, but after the week I had and with the reel as it currently stands I’m glad I gave myself an extra couple of weeks to learn even more.

Speaking of releases, I’m still on track for showing off the all-singing-all-dancing RYGCBMKO-1 reel on Easter Monday. Even though it’s a progress reel, it’s still good fun to watch. 🙂