EQ Cube Race - Audio driven simulation

[John Svensson]

Hi everyone!

 

I just finished my latest personal project, its nothing fancy and a bit weird. It emerged from me thinking about procedural rigs, walk cycles and crowd simulation. It's neither of these things but for me, its something of a first step towards something like that, but maybe its mainly an exercise in VEX. 

 

Its an audio driven animation/simulation, no keyframes except on the camera.

 

The backbone of this is a Point Wrangle with 300 lines (yikes! of highly unoptimized VEX code) running in a SOP Solver in a DOP network.

Each cube has a trigger, listening to a specific frequency of the song. When it gets triggered the cube gets energy forward. The energy decreases for each frame until the cube only has momentum and eventually after tilting back and forth, it settles. The Point Wrangle calculates each cubes position for every frame.

 

If anyone has any interesting ideas, tips, pointers or tutorials about procedural rigs / walk cycles or crowd simulation I would be glad to hear them.

 

Thx

 

/ John

 

http://vimeo.com/113908690

 

[media][/media]

Edited December 8, 2014 by John Svensson

[eetu]

A neat idea, I like it

[John Svensson]

Hehe thanks eetu :] It was fun to do. Next up I will try to implement Craig Reynolds flocking behaviors (although not on cubes).

[Atom]

That is neat!

 

So how did you make the the sqaure pulse out pattern when the cube lands in i't new spot?

[Shinjipierre]

Awesome

[Sierra62]

really cool.  That is probably the most unique idea for a race I've seen.

[John Svensson]

Thanks everyone, glad to hear you liked it!

 

So how did you make the the sqaure pulse out pattern when the cube lands in i't new spot?

 

As everything else I guess there are 100 ways to do this, the way I've done stuff like this lately is to object merge my geometry I want to spawn stuff like that into a Sop solver in an else empty Dop network and there I'm looking for certain condition to be true and if there are I create a point and merge it into my main chain in the Sop solver. And then you can treat it like a regular particle.

 

If you create a life and age (or corresponding, born & kill frame) you can delete your point after n frames in the Dop network and have a Vopsop or something outside after the Dop network to control pscale, color and alpha (like a regular pop simulation). Age divided by life gives you a nice 0-1 value.

 

I don't know if that was super clear, I'll attach an example file.

CubeRipples_V01_02.hipnc