Tag: animation

It’s been 9 to 15 April 2017. Happy Easter and if you’re in Australia, remember: bilbies not bunnies.

It’s just a couple of days until RYGCBMK◯ comes out and I have just a few shots to go. Looking back at some of the earliest shots I made, they jar badly with the overall “round shapes on black” aesthetic I ended up adopting. The hand-drawn shots also jarred a bit. With the extra time afforded me by the Easter break, I’ve started replacing the most out-of-place crappy shots with nicer updated shots. The replacements often retain the original idea but re-execute it in a way that feels like it belongs with the rest of the reel.

But enough about that. Let’s talk about how to do interpolation between two values in Animation Nodes.

Here’s a shot that I did last night.

As the purple rainbow ball moves across the screen, the small ball move towards it and grow larger. The node setup that places the nodes looks like this.

The key to controlling movement and size is in the Animate nodes. I’m feeding the Time input of the Animate Vector node with a Distance value instead. Instead of changing a value according to how much time has gone by, I’m changing it according to  how far the “attractor” object is to a position which is pre-calculated for each ball.

If the ball is closer to (before) the calculated position than the “duration” (a minimum influence distance), the Animate node interpolates towards the “Start” input – the rainbow ball’s position, or a larger size. If the distance is greater than (after) the “duration”, the node interpolates all the way to the “End” position – the small ball’s calculated position, or a resting size.

Animate nodes: not just for animating!

That’s all for this week. I’ll post a mini-update on Monday with the details of where you can see the finished reel, but that’s all for now. Back to it!

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. 🙂

Greetings from 19 to 25 March 2017.

Things are very different this week for RYGCBMK◯. Ironically it’s going so well that I don’t have much time to write about it.

Between having a much-needed breakthrough with the soundtrack and playing with Animation Nodes for two days straight last weekend, I went from not having much of a clue what I’m doing to kind of knowing what I’m doing. My confidence is way up and the project has gone from being mildly disappointing and grindy to actually kind of fun. Hurray! 🙂

Something else I’m noticing this week – I’m getting so much more bang for buck out of my loops by allowing things like scale, location and other stuff as input parameters. It’s the difference between a time-saving setup and a truly powerful setup that lets me experiment quickly.

The final product feels less like a movie and more like a progress reel – a little underwhelming at first while I’m figuring things out, but then the fun kicks in once I get my bearings.

Now, I wonder if anyone would be interested in getting their hands on the .blend files after this is all done…