Point Instance Animation

[iamjaideep80]

Hi Everybody...

I am trying to make a school of fish. So I am trying to use particles

and Fish animation instanced on them. If I make Fish animation as a

single object and instance it, what I will have is the same animation on

every point without any offset. I tried Copy sop but it is too heavy. So

instancing is must.

I want to have a time offset, to break similarity. How can I do that?

Suppose I write out my animation as a sequence of bgeo files, how can i

make each point to load different bgeo file?? How can I pass this

attribute??????

I know it can be done by creating different objects for different frame

number and cycle thru them using instance attribute in Point Sop. But I

don't want to do that cause my animation is 100 frame long. So that

way, I have to creat 100 different objects. Is there any simple method to

refere to a file insted of object in instance attribute????

Can i use Mantra or Renderman Procedure to so this???

----- iamjaideep80

Jaideep Khadilkar

TD, Sciclone Motion Graphics

[Jason]

I know it can be done by creating different objects for different frame

number and cycle thru them using instance attribute in Point Sop. But I

don't want to do that cause my animation is 100 frame long. So that

way, I have to creat 100 different objects. Is there any simple method to

refere to a file insted of object in instance attribute????

Yeah, I'm afraid this is only way that I know of, unless you want to write a little loop inside of the IFD - read the bottom of the IFDFormatDocument for a hint on how to do it.

One neat little trick is to use opdigits() to control the frame number you're reading in. If you have 10 frames of animation on disk as frog.1.bgeo ... frog.10.bgeo - and you're going to "Read From File..." it in and instance that, try an opdigits route. frog.`opdigits(".")`.bgeo

This way you need to just make one object and the copy/paste it over and over and each new object will automatically refer to its own frame number based on the digits in the object name. And I'd throw these all in a subnet just to keep it neat.

I too wish for a more procedural way of doing this.

Can i use Mantra or Renderman Procedure to so this???

There is a Mantra procedural called HScriptInstance which is sooo promising since it allows you to do exactly what you want here but it is slow and can be buggy as it seems like it's more of a "Proof Of Concept" implementation than a production-capable tool. And it won't optimize for true instancing (i.e., it'll run the procedure over and over for exact fish). Search for info on it on this forum as we've spoken about it a few times.