Blending Between Two Different Waves In Chops?

[Symbolic]

Hi,

I am trying to do this in CHOPS:

I have a ball. It has an animation on y.

I bring the ty in chops and manipulate it in order to get the effect of "the ball gets stuck in a force field".

I kind of did it in the light of the CHOPs tutorial at sidefx which is a very helpful one.

So what I did is:

1) Read in the ty.

2) Math it with a sin wave.

3) Use an OBJ level slider to control the strength of the sin wave over time.

The only thing I found annoying is that I really want to control the quality of the blend between ty's graph and sin wave's graph.

Because the sin wave kicks in after a certain amount of time... so that it is not messing with the ty graph.

I manged to do that by changing the "Phase" of the sine graph and trying to match it with the ty graph. But every time I change something related to the sin wave I have to manually re-adjust the phase so there is no break between the ty graph and the sin graph.

Here are some images:

Blend Problem.

Phase adjusted. No blend problem.

Is there a way to make the sin wave's starting point properly blended with the incoming graphs ending point?

Cheers.

x2_8.hipnc

Edited February 1, 2008 by Symbolic

[Marc]

Not that this really helps you much, but every time I've had to do this (thankfully very few times) I've just adjusted it manually. Frustrating though it was, it always seemed like less work than building something to do it automatically .

M

[digitallysane]

In your file, try to replace the Interpolate CHOP with a Sequence CHOP with "Method" set to Overlap Sequences.

Dragos

[Symbolic]

Hi digitallysane,

Thanks. I will try it. Hope it works

Marc, thanks... I know sometimes it is good to make things manually... but I just wanted to be sure... I think this is a very common problem.

[andrewlowell]

To blend use the blend CHOP (maybe shift CHOP first etc)! That's what it's there for. Funny story, for whatever reason when I was learning CHOPs I didn't notice it and made a DA that did the exact same thing and had almost the exact same parameters. So, basically ... anytime you want to blend one set of data with another set of data you probably want a third data channel, or channels to accomplish this.

You could do this procedurally with triggers and ramps, or non-procedurally. Non-procedurally is of course faster, one of the easiest ways to do this is by making an animation curve and fetching it (you can also use the new channel chop) and using that to blend between the two channels. That way you can control the exact amount of blend.

If you have trouble just post a file and I'll show you the setup or setup(s)

I've had mixed results with the sequence CHOP. It's fast and has some useful features but if it gets complicated .. meaning a more complex blend or sequencing one channel according to different numbers of channels ... your best bet (IMO) is to actually collect the timing with the count chop and hold it out, then copy the data with an expression CHOP set to that count time.

Edited February 3, 2008 by andrewlowell

[Symbolic]

Hi andrewlowell,

Thank you very much! I am working on it right now...

[Symbolic]

Hi Guys!

digitallysane, the "Sequence CHOP with "Method" set to Overlap Sequences" technique worked very nice. Still needs some adjustments but is still a very smooth blend...

Thanks!

andrewlowell, I tried the Shift CHOP, the Blend CHOP... blending, shifting! It was a total mess... could not get anything useful.

... And I am very curious about your technique... Maybe you would like to make a small example... that would be a very great help... if you have time...