Trying out this effect

[Strife]

Hi, I am trying to achieve this effect from transformer 1, where the allsparks cube had this "wire-frame glow" then slowly transforming into a small cube. The only way I can thing off is to use a box with points, copied box on each points and scale them slightly, allowing light inside to sip through the gaps. Anyone had any idea and help me out? Thank you.

Here is a image of the effect: image of effect

Thank you.

Edited July 11, 2011 by Strife

[are2D2]

Hi, I am trying to achieve this effect from transformer 1, where the allsparks cube had this "wire-frame glow" then slowly transforming into a small cube. The only way I can thing off is to use a box with points, copied box on each points and scale them slightly, allowing light inside to sip through the gaps. Anyone had any idea and help me out? Thank you.

Here is a image of the effect: image of effect

Thank you.

Check out polywire....

[pclaes]

Are you just looking for the glowing box effect or also for the actual splitting boxes?

The glow could be done with curves (similar to polywire), with textures on the boxes that are triggered, with pointcloud lookups in your shader from the edges. Perhaps with PBR illuminate from object. I would probably do it with a displacement shader (on the boxes) that is masked by a simple texture - it's easy enough to unwrap a box . -I haven't seen that effect in a while though.

I was playing around a week ago or so with a file that does some recursive box splitting. It's not too far from that effect, but you would have to modify the way it triggers and the way each box moves. That should still not be too hard - a matter of coming up with the right conditions to trigger the neighbour boxes. Have a look, it might help you if you are trying to figure out that side of the effect. (For me it was just a fun file )

recursive_box_splitting_02.hip

[Strife]

Are you just looking for the glowing box effect or also for the actual splitting boxes?

The glow could be done with curves (similar to polywire), with textures on the boxes that are triggered, with pointcloud lookups in your shader from the edges. Perhaps with PBR illuminate from object. I would probably do it with a displacement shader (on the boxes) that is masked by a simple texture - it's easy enough to unwrap a box . -I haven't seen that effect in a while though.

I was playing around a week ago or so with a file that does some recursive box splitting. It's not too far from that effect, but you would have to modify the way it triggers and the way each box moves. That should still not be too hard - a matter of coming up with the right conditions to trigger the neighbour boxes. Have a look, it might help you if you are trying to figure out that side of the effect. (For me it was just a fun file )

Hey, thank you for the advices and the hip file. I am trying to decipher it but looks complex. The effect looks cool, very nice.

For the wire-glow effect, someone also told me about some masking, using a paint sop to paint the attribute and vopsop to important the attribute.

Thank you.

[pclaes]

I tried playing with it but i cant seems to reduce the amount of boxes. And i also dont really understand the purpose of the bound and the group node then later deleting them, dont really understand this part.

Ah yes, at the very beginning of the network. This is simply to avoid having zero in my color values... so I increase the bounds with a bit of helper geometry which I group separately, then apply the color and then delete the helper geometry.

Why am I doing this? Well... I was trying to link the hue of the color (HSV) to the generations of splitting. Sort of make them go through a rainbow type offset as they split more and more. Now when your hsV -> value is zero this is boring.

Also I wanted to combine that with my own custom instancer and go crazy with it . Haven't done that yet.

That file isn't really cleaned up as I was experimenting with attraction to an SDF (of a sphere). So the boxes would split and move towards a spherical shape (but this ended up a bit dull). I think the allspark effect is cooler. I might try it too.

In regards to limiting the amount of splits it does, this is linked to the generation attribute called "gen". After the "SPLIT" you can insert a couple of delete nodes to filter out the final generation. Something like delete selected -> $GEN>=ch("../CTRLS/max_gen") in both branches. Then create a new branch with a delete node from the SPLIT and keep selected -> $GEN>=ch("../CTRLS/max_gen") and merge that in with the other two branches.

In a way the final split is a bit of a special case as it needs to ignore the splittime condition... I thought it would be easier to treat it separately as a separate branch.

It's kind of a particle system through a sopsolver. -- if you are interested in more of those kind of setups, do an advanced search here on odforce with my username and look for "sopsolver".