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Learning VEX via Animated Gifs - Bees & Bombs


mestela

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Easy one, most of the time is spent tweaking the settings to match his elegant timing and motion. I'd record the gif at 60fps if I could, but licecap runnign under wine running under linux can only do so much, and post-editing gifs with gimp makes me want to stab things...

 

http://beesandbombs.tumblr.com/post/131491937704/beesandbombs-wave-grid-from-the-archive

 

post-7292-0-95782200-1445325017_thumb.gi

 

wave_grid_v01.hip

Edited by mestela
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Dancing orbs:

 

http://beesandbombs.tumblr.com/post/131113717324/dancing-orbs

 

post-7292-0-06670900-1445551952_thumb.gi

 

dancing_orbs_v02.hipnc

 

 

Haven't quite nailed this one, can't get the colours to loop cleanly, nor could I work out how to get the overall rotation and keep it all seamless, not at this time of night anyway.

 

(edit)

 

Ah, fixed it! I had 3 different curves before that were merged in the wrong order. Making them in the right order, then rebuilding a single prim fixed the colour cycling.

 

The rotation was fixed by trial n error. :)

 

The jump in the gif is me being lazy, I can't be arsed to edit the gif after capturing with licecap to trim the excess frames. I assure you it loops cleanly in houdini!

Edited by mestela
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Pi constant in VEX

 

Constant PI defined in math.h. Include it at the beginning of the code. I don't see any benefit of it, however, and usually defining it myself or use it as magic constant since it is very recognizable, and I need it once in some trig function call. It's numerical value won't be changed in the near future.

 

By the way, why you're using underscores for every variable name? There won't be any collisions with code's environment. Snippet's body enclosed in it's function. You can even use P or N letters for variable names. Real position, normal and other global variables will be mangled with "_bound_" prefix in resulting code.

Edited by f1480187
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Guest mantragora

Constant PI defined in math.h. Include it at the beginning of the code. I don't see any benefit of it, however, and usually defining it myself...

 

There is a PI defined globally in Houdini. Look in Edit => Aliases and Variables => Variables tab.

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why you're using underscores for every variable name?

 

I don't have a real reason :)

That's something I picked up after viewing someone else doing similar thing. I think it was even here on odforce.

I guess that's more an habit to avoid collision in any sort of language, not only VEX.

Habits evolve with time, I'm having this one for the moment.

 

Thanks for the $PI, didn't know it was working inside VEX directly, I was usually defining it as a parameter then using a ch("pi").

 

------------------------------------------------------

 

Nice streak mestela :)

 

My try on this one: http://beesandbombs.tumblr.com/post/95558180379/circle-wave

 

post-10914-0-43269300-1447073353.gif

 

 

It took me a while to figure out how to give this travelling wave feeling. I forced it by simulating a zoetrope effect but problem is that I can't slow it down to match the reference.

If anyone has an idea...

 

circle_wave.hipnc

Edited by iamyog
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had a look, you've built a static wave, and then rotated it. the bees+bombs one has the wave animate in place, then the entire shape is rotated in the opposite direction by slightly less than the wave speed, giving that traveling effect.

 

I had a go, and split the wave traveling into the vex wrangle, and the overall circle rotation into its own transform sop, more controllable.

 

circle_wave.hip

Edited by mestela
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had a look, you've built a static wave, and then rotated it. the bees+bombs one has the wave animate in place, then the entire shape is rotated in the opposite direction by slightly less than the wave speed, giving that traveling effect.

 

I thought it was coming from some static position issue, so I made sure to have the travelling effect first in the "loop anim" wrangle but I couldn't get there.

Thanks for your explanations.

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