Looking for Animating Parameters

Can anyone point me to where I can animate different parameters.

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Damien Alomar on February 16, 2010 at 12:32pm

You can only animate one slider at a time. What I've done in the past is had one "master slider" that all of the parameters that I'm looking to change run off of. The only "gotcha" is that you'll have to make sure all of the parameters are getting the information from that slider in the right way. Since I like to have the main slider just be integers (ie frames), then I'll usually push the slider value through a formula to get it into something meaningful for the parameter in question.

Another thing I've actually done is make curves that represent the values of a given parameter at a given time, then evaluate that curve to extract that value. This is actually a fairly common practice in animation platforms, but its just a manual application of it. Again, its all hooked up to a master slider, which acts like a timeline.

Permalink Reply by Chris Wilkins on February 16, 2010 at 12:36pm

Damian,

I was just doing something like this but much simpler. Do you have any good examples of the master slider / curve evaluator technique?

Permalink Reply by Damien Alomar on February 16, 2010 at 12:57pm

I'm actually putting one together right now. I'll see about posting it somewhere by the end of the day. Its not too hard, just slightly tedious.

Permalink Reply by Matt on February 16, 2010 at 1:15pm

Sounds good looking forward to it.

Permalink Reply by Damien Alomar on February 17, 2010 at 9:39am

Got everything posted today. Check out LiquidTectonics.com for the post. The video is there, but at the moment is still processing. The 3dm and GHX files are available for download and the links are at the end of the post. Also, here's the link directly to the post as opposed to just my blog.

Permalink Reply by Chris Wilkins on February 17, 2010 at 10:19am

Thanks Damien (spelled it wrong last time). You're right - those curves are crazy.
I'm going to try your camera moving code. Seems obvious enough how it works.
I'm anxious for YouTube to finish processing the video.

What do you think is best reference for all of the methods/properties/etc. for RMA.OpenNURBS and RMA.Rhino and whatever else is available for scripting? I've kind of avoided scripting very much just because I hadn't found where to look for this info yet.

Permalink Reply by Damien Alomar on February 17, 2010 at 11:43am

I'm a little annoyed the youtube hasn't finished processing (usually it doesn't take this long), but it will be up eventually (even if I need to reupload). The camera code is fairly simple. You only need to set the things that you explicitly need. I needed to adjust lens length and the camera up vector for what I wanted, but if you don't need them you don't have to set them. Lastly, the easiest way to manipulate the camera is to just use the active viewport, which is only really an issue if you like to work in quad view (I don't, so that's okay for me). You can adjust specific viewports, but that's way more of a task.

The best reference is still the dotNET helpfile. Its not organized the same way as the Rhinoscript one. You really need to know what class your looking for, then go through the methods/properties. Sometimes their aren't descriptions, so the best thing to do then is us the intellisense description for some explanation. The best thing though is to ask questions when you don't know what you need or what something does, and the plugins newsgroup is the best place to ask. Dale, Steve, Jeff, and even JD help out quite a bit over there.

Permalink Reply by Damien Alomar on February 17, 2010 at 1:27pm

Reuploaded the video and its finished processing... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__GDhZlQw-Q

Permalink Reply by Chris Wilkins on February 17, 2010 at 1:41pm

That video is awesome. I'm going to study that and figure out exactly what is happening.

Do you mesh it to speed up the display?

Permalink Reply by Damien Alomar on February 17, 2010 at 3:06pm

Thanks. The default mesh just wasn't satisfactory as it was too jagged with some of the smoother/subtler curves. I wanted this to have a somewhat vector look, since I have some previous black/white linework typestuff, but didn't want to go through the hassle of actually getting it into flash. The meshing itself took a little bit of time to play around with, since by the time the curve gets really crazy, the meshing does too. The first time I tried to render this, the meshing was taking like 3-4 min a frame...not cool.

Permalink Reply by Noah H on February 18, 2010 at 6:29am

Hey guys,
Im trying to create something similar, a curve that moves. Do you guys know what the best way to create something like that in grasshopper. This video shows the properties im trying to acheive. http://vimeo.com/8220080 (see from 1.25mins). Really need help with this one!
thanks

Noam

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