United3dArtists Archive

clintonman · Post by **clintonman** » 11 Apr 2019, 21:20

A manual copy of Blender Animation Nodes. Doesn't really use nodes, mostly some hand coded scripts to get this specific result. The only key frame animated item is the torus flying through the scene. The tiles react automatically.
I'll publish the scene file in the techniques section of my website later.

Original Blender Tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1lY6VXBQ_E

Edit: Oops, forgot to actually publish the scene files.

Flip, crazy sphere and countdown scene files can all be found on the bottom of this page:
http://clintons3d.com/plugins/truespace ... index.html

seppgirty · Post by **seppgirty** » 12 Apr 2019, 01:33

Very, very cool.

clintonman · Post by **clintonman** » 12 Apr 2019, 01:52

Thank you.

Here's another. Also based on the Blender Animation Nodes but using truespace scripting instead.

Original Blender Tutorial - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWNXUvZR-_I

bitkar · Post by **bitkar** » 12 Apr 2019, 07:30

wow... i remember some old tS default scene, that used python to open and close a gate automatically. I guess thats something similar but more "wow" :) it looks trully amazing, esp. the sphere.

Draise · Post by **Draise** » 12 Apr 2019, 14:09

Wow cool!

Just a theory, you could do this with the nodes in trueSpace, right? I mean, looping instances and vertex things.. programming isn't that artist friendly... but I did have a hunch you could do this!

Can this be nodified? Maybe re-creating the animation nodes system in Javascript in trueSpace?

RAYMAN · Post by **RAYMAN** » 12 Apr 2019, 17:42

As far as I know its pretty open for a lot of things!
But its also a lot of work!

clintonman · Post by **clintonman** » 12 Apr 2019, 19:35

It can be done but my earlier test (not yet shared with the world) showed it to be too slow. As soon as I combined the various nodes into a single node it got a lot faster. Funny thing is once you know how to code it's only a little bit more difficult than hooking up a node network and when you're done it's easier to understand what you did when you see it later.

Edit: Forgot to mention, it would be feasible to do a nodes based system that isn't slow by having some kind of "compiling" behind the scenes that converts the network to a single or small number of non-looping script nodes. It's the looping/jumping in and out that seems to kill the performance.

Draise · Post by **Draise** » 12 Apr 2019, 20:36

With AN in blender, looping kills performance too.

I get coding may be more optimized... but personally I really really detest coding functionality, I'm a click and point kind of artist, so.. coding really doesn't sit well with me all the time, though i can a little. It's one thing writing hundreds of keystrokes instead of tens of clicks to get the same functionality.

bitkar · Post by **bitkar** » 13 Apr 2019, 09:51

you are still better than me, i never understood how to work with nodes :D (never tried hard tho)

clintonman · Post by **clintonman** » 14 Apr 2019, 05:25

Here's one in process. Also comes from a Blender Animation nodes tutorial. The final one will be bigger with more hexagons at half the size each. The noisy movement is from a cloud texture and it needs to be smoothed out. Two more elements to add are a color change based on height and waves coming out from the numbers as they count down. I think it'll be a couple of days before I can work on it again.

RAYMAN · Post by **RAYMAN** » 15 Apr 2019, 12:26

Just a question? Would a Blender node system hosting be possible indide TS???
Animation node system in Blender is there!
So..?
Dont know? Any way to get something going that way?
There is also a node based modeler in Moi that used Java!
Any possibilty to use parts of that ..wih some kind of middler?

clintonman · Post by **clintonman** » 16 Apr 2019, 14:35

RAYMAN wrote: 15 Apr 2019, 12:26 Just a question? Would a Blender node system hosting be possible indide TS???
Animation node system in Blender is there!
So..?
Dont know? Any way to get something going that way?
There is also a node based modeler in Moi that used Java!
Any possibilty to use parts of that ..wih some kind of middler?

That sounds like it would be very difficult to do.

RAYMAN · Post by **RAYMAN** » 17 Apr 2019, 17:55

Ok thanks! Was just a thought!

trueBlue · Post by **trueBlue** » 18 Apr 2019, 13:09

Very cool, thanks for sharing!
What did you find wrong with tS761's Look at Matrix?

clintonman · Post by **clintonman** » 18 Apr 2019, 16:18

trueBlue wrote: 18 Apr 2019, 13:09 Very cool, thanks for sharing!
What did you find wrong with tS761's Look at Matrix?

It just plain didn't work, no matter what I tried. The lookat node works and I've used it in the past as an external lookat calculator. The scripting matrix lookat function just seems to give me junk values. If you know how to make it work, let me know.

clintonman · Post by **clintonman** » 23 Apr 2019, 01:15

I was able to create a ring image using one of the linear gradient images included in the unofficial tS upgrade combined with a Color Curve nodes from the compositing nodes.
The Color Curve was a surprise to me. It was updated at sometime in the past to use the NURBS curves system instead of using animation curves and the it was never documented. I found a bug in the script and fixed it, so the current version in the update and on my site still have the bug. The linear gradient image was used in place of Blender's spherical blend texture and the curves took the place for Blender's color ramp system used to convert the sphere texture to a ring. Now I need to decide how to handle the scaling of the ring to make animated waves in the pegs.

clintonman · Post by **clintonman** » 01 May 2019, 00:54

I have an idea how to handle the ring animation. Took some time to update the compositing nodes so I can use them to do it. Stay tuned!

clintonman · Post by **clintonman** » 05 May 2019, 06:15

Good news is I got the waves and color change to work.
Not so good news is truespace can't handle it the way it works now, each hex shape is an individual mesh and tS doesn't like having a lot of meshes in the scene. It became so unstable I couldn't make any more improvements or changes without crashes.

Not really surprised but was hoping I could push it just a bit further.

Draise · Post by **Draise** » 06 May 2019, 13:51

Yeah, I hit that cap a lot with my work in trueSpace. It was one of the principal reasons I jumped ship, oh and the hard rigging with shear bugs I found with local/world matrices... Blender also has a bad cap on geometry but handles instances a bit better. There is a way to work around this issue in trueSpace is instancing the "mesh" data to instance nulls, so you only have one mesh, and have it instanced many times. It does help the performance somewhat. I didn't perfect this workflow, but for trees and things I was using it relatively successfully.

clintonman · Post by **clintonman** » 06 May 2019, 15:42

Draise wrote: 06 May 2019, 13:51 Yeah, I hit that cap a lot with my work in trueSpace. It was one of the principal reasons I jumped ship, oh and the hard rigging with shear bugs I found with local/world matrices... Blender also has a bad cap on geometry but handles instances a bit better. There is a way to work around this issue in trueSpace is instancing the "mesh" data to instance nulls, so you only have one mesh, and have it instanced many times. It does help the performance somewhat. I didn't perfect this workflow, but for trees and things I was using it relatively successfully.

Interesting, I would have thought the "nulls" approach wouldn't help at all. I'll keep that in mind for the future. I was able to work around it this weekend by creating my own simple instancer. It uses a single mesh created by internally copying the source mesh. No crashes and performance is way up.

Draise · Post by **Draise** » 06 May 2019, 16:21

Like most DirectX engines or game engines, the quantity of objects (despite geometry count) will affect performance heavily. So having one cached mesh then instanced multiple times in the 3D space will dramatically drop your GPU/CPU ram (instead of one new mesh taking up a processing slot each copy).

I also do this for most game engines, better to have one 100,000 poly mesh (so that it loads once, then draws many times, depends on the ram buffer) than x10 unique 10,000 poly meshes (loads each once, ten times with a x10 times slower card load on model changes, with the addition of drawing each over and over again, making a performance bottleneck). On top of that, better to have x1 10,000 poly mesh instanced X10 times than x10 unique 10,000 poly meshes - as the GPU will load that one mesh once, then instance it in a heartbeat making the bottleneck smaller. FPS will be better on the GPU this way, easier load on the software.

clintonman · Post by **clintonman** » 12 May 2019, 01:07

Final version. Got it up to the resolution I was hoping for. At that quality level it did not run in real time. I think the limiting factor at this point is that it works by moving a tall box to the center of each hexagonal shape and runs a boolean operation. If an intersection is found it moves the corresponding hexagon. There are 1920 hexagons in the mesh and each hexagon has 20 vertices so that comes to 38400 vertices to copy and move for each frame. Even without the countdown number plus booleans processing it takes about 1 second to update for each frame, add it back in and it takes a few seconds to update.
It was a great little project. In the future I'll keep it a little bit simpler.

Edit:
I added a link to the scene files in the first post of this thread.

clintonman · Post by **clintonman** » 01 Nov 2019, 04:37

Ripples. This was actually the first of the procedural animations and was going to be part of a combined model and workspace animation. It's based on a 3dBuzz Houdini tutorial and started out as a bunch of nodes all linked together. It ran too slowly and I ended up combining all the nodes into 1 ripple node it runs much more quickly. The ripple deform takes place on a hidden mesh because the normals don't update which makes the ripple difficult to see, so the mesh is copied to a another mesh in the scene and normals are recomputed for it. It's the same thing as pressing the Auto Facet Normals button. The render uses the D3D Render script with hooks to run the ripple command at each frame of the animation. There is also a watchdog in the scene that can be connected to the RipplePlane for manually scrubbing the timeline.
D3D Render comes installed in the latest Unofficial Updates and is also available here: http://clintons3d.com/plugins/truespace ... ender.html
The scene file is attached below.

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