noob - how to create a "growth" effect using the solver sop?

[Baldric]

Hello everyone,

 

I am trying to teach myself some, for most of you, rather simple effects I can experiment with and expand upon. One thing I am very interested in is creating a parameter that grows iteratively over frames. So, for example, colouring more and more points, from an intial selection in a point cloud, say red, over a given framerange.

I have an example which uses vopsop with while loops, if statements etc., but I was wondering about how to create this with a solver sop. I kind of get how to use the solver sop with an animated control object to add new points to a group iteratively, but when I want to use a point cloud open and its search radius to control and implement the "growth" my noobie head fails. (So, no other objects other than the point cloud itself to control the growth)

 

Can anyone help me understand this or direct me to a tutorial or similar?

 

Thanks,

 

Dag

[Ryan]

Here is a very simple example using pcopen within a solverSOP. You can try to change the search radius and maybe randomize it by point number.

growth_solversop.hip

[Baldric]

Thanks for your reply Ryan!

 

Looks good, and seems to work :-)

It progresses a little fast though, even if the search radius is small... Any idea how to get more control over the spread? And how would I be able to randomize by point number? 

Thanks again

 

Doug

[Ryan]

You can just add a custom radius attribute on the points and feed that into the pcopen. Then after the solverSOP, you can add a timeshift or timewarp to adjust the speed.

growth_solversop_v2.hip

[Robert]

I think that the file that was posted by koen in the transformers cubes thread on this forum exactly does what you are describing.

http://forums.odforce.net/topic/20821-transformers-cubes/

The author uses dops to do the iteration but you could simply copy the content of the dop network into a sop solver and it would work the same.

[Baldric]

Thanks Ryan and Robert,

 

your tips have been really helpful! 

And thanks for the link to Koen's example hip file!

 

Doug