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Journals RYGCBMK◯ Stuff I made

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.)

let r = radius, for z = 0 to 2*pi: x = sin(z*r), y = cos(z*r) — and so much more!

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.

Float goes in, geometry comes out..

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

Hm… does this need a glow effect perhaps?

Or how about a little heartrate monitor?

This could probably use a glow effect too..

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

A synchronised sawtooth node chain with bonus Animate Float node

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:

function(k,x) { return k*x*pow(Math.E, 1.0 – (k*x)); } but with boxes and lines

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

See? Totally looks better with glow.. hey.. wait a minute, that’s just gaussian blur in Add mode!

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

From this zoom level, it’s just lines and coloured boxes.

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.

Inspired by stuff I saw one evening on the backs of my eyelids…

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. 🙂

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Journals RYGCBMK◯ Stuff I made

RYG-◯ turns a corner!

Greetings from 19 to 25 March 2017.

So many bubbles…

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.

So many colourful round things…

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! 🙂

Frickin lasers!

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.

Meet Bubble Snake, whose segments are based on the sine function of their world x position.

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…

Categories
Journals RYGCBMK◯ Stuff I made

Beat as in “tired”… or as in “rhythm”?

That’s been 26 February to 4 March 2017. And it is both tired and rhythm. One because the other.

On Wednesday, I made the decision to step away from “A moment in the sun” until I finish this heinously draining temporary internal transfer at Easter (mid-April). A narrative animated short film is the wrong project for me until the work stress eases off. Something little and time-boxed would be much better.

So it’s time again for a brief change of creative direction.

I took a couple of months at the beginning of last year to sculpt and do character animation and that refreshed me nicely. This time I’m going to learn Animation Nodes with the intent of making some groovy procedural animation.

The working title is RYGCBMK◯, though RYGCBMKO is fine too. You can probably guess what the letters R G B and C M Y K stand for. The circle is just a circle. The finished piece will be pleasing rhythms for the eyes and ears.

I’ll be working on it until Easter and I’m targeting an Easter Monday release. I’ve written a project brief and set particular limitations around creative methodology, but I’ll talk a bit more about those next week. 🙂