Fermat's Spiral - First Digital Asset

[Valentino]

Hey guys i wanted to create a quick digital asset on something that caught my attention called Fermat's Spiral and am quite proud of it because this is my first digital asset of houdini without using tutorials or anything

here is a quick render i did , nothing is keyframed everything is procedural here , even the colours

Let me know what u think!

[LEO-oo-]

Nice - like it! Good job!

[zglynn]

Very cool stuff.

[Matt_K]

Hey Valentino,

That looks interesting!

Are you going to show us how you did it?

Matt.

[Valentino]

yea sure! Dont have the file with me but i can descripe the process if u want to!

[rob]

yea sure! Dont have the file with me but i can descripe the process if u want to!

One thing I just don't have a clue how to do is take a mathematical formula and then do something with it ! Would be great to hear your approach.

rob

[Valentino]

One thing I just don't have a clue how to do is take a mathematical formula and then do something with it ! Would be great to hear your approach.

rob

the way i "translated" the formula was that if every shape (sphere in this case) i create, rotates 137.5 (golden ration) while its pivot point was at the origin (0,0,0) will give me a representation of Fermats spiral!

steps i followed was:

1. Created a sphere

2. put a copy node and copied it 1000 times while moving it 0.05 in the x axis!

3. after i created a foreach node which gave everysphere the same pivot point the Original sphere has and then rotate it in Y axis by 137.5

that was the basic idea!

hope this helps

[pclaes]

you could also do that in a single copy node and change:

the order of transformation -> scale trans rot

translatex: 0.05

rotatey: 137.5

[Valentino]

yeah that was my first approach but then i wanted to put the random colours and thats why i used the foreach node to create groups and then assigned different colours to each group!

[pclaes]

groups tend to be slow, especially with the foreach. It is faster to stamp your copy variable upstream and use that to assign your colors.

[Valentino]

groups tend to be slow, especially with the foreach. It is faster to stamp your copy variable upstream and use that to assign your colors.

here is my .hip file , you mind take a look at it and tell me if it could be done easier?

edit: hip on the next post

Edited November 5, 2010 by valentino.vfx

[Valentino]

hip file

spiral.hip

[pclaes]

I've set it up so it's 3 nodes inside a subnetwork. There are some controls on the subnetwork.

Good luck with learning houdini, there are many ways to do something and some are better in certain scenarios. When you start dealing with lots of data optimization starts to become important, but at the end of the day if you get the job done, that's what matters.

Generally when I build a tool it starts as a prototype and is a bit slow, and then you start optimizing it without breaking the functionality.

spiral_2.hip

[primzahl]

hello, that looks good.

you can create a similar effect by using an L-System and animate the angel parameter.