Cineversity

Hi there,

I’m experimenting with automated animations on animation-controllers. Imagine a random flapping of a wing or something by wiggling a Null as a parent of it’s controller or the controller itself. What – of course – works beautifully if using a vibrate-tag on my Null.

But the vibrate-tag is very limited in it’s possibilities to customise. So I thought using animated noises, stacked in layer-shaders, should be an easy way to build complex and very controllable random movements. I tried to apply my animated custom-noise-shader with a shader-effector, as well as with a displacement-deformer. It’s never working on a Null. Note, that I did choose Object under the deformation-tab of the Shader-effector for example.

Both techniques do work if I use them on actual geometry, like a cube instead of my controller-Null.

I thought the solution would be simply to just connect my Null to the cube (via Constraints, Expresso or simply parenting). None of this works to move my Null. The problem seems to be, that the original coordinates of my cube are neither changed by the shader-effector nor the displace-deformer.

There must be a way to achieve my original goal to use my own stack of noises as a driver for a Null. What am I overlooking? Has anybody an idea?

Thanks and kind regards
Markus

Hi Markus,

Any displacement moves the points of an object. The points of an object relate to the axis. The axis of an object relates to the world system, if not a parent or any other influence comes across.
Deformer or displacements: all work in that way. The Null object is an polygon object without points, to make a comparison, so the axis stays that way. I have found only one exception, see scene file below.
If you like to move an axis, you need to make this Noise field/space available to the Axis.

If you follow the idea that I have sketched in the file below, this might work for your set up. Please test this carefully, as I haven’t invest a lot of time so far into it.

Scene file:
https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share/bGSIpQmuSakrqOzyYJ6mZujAjEsat89aiMVGqq0BKSB

Please note that the Noise is set to World!

All the best

Hi Dr. Sassi,

thank you for your efforts. Unfortunately this just replicates my experiments. In your file are only the primitives animated by the noise, not the Nulls.
There must be a way. If not the object-axis but vertices are animated by the deformer/shader, isn’t there a way to get the coordinates of a single vertex-point via expresso or something?

Best regards
Markus

Markus,

Just a thought: If the Null is directly the position that is used to “sample” the position for example, it will change this result by being moved.

XPresso has a Noise Node, but that defeats the idea of being as clear as a texture/shader

Since your target is a Shader based approach, with just a single Null, I’m not certain what else to say.

Example:
Scene file
https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share/gdufO03jjgPiEVMrQDvXkqnWCprhThkIlaXMJVvAwSh

All the best

Dr. Sassi,

thank you for your efforts, but a Noise-node in Expresso isn’t a solution for me either, becauser the noise in the node is almost as simple as the vibrate-tag.

But I found a solution, that maybe helps someone with a similar problem:
I’m using a deformer on a proxy-polygon, that I will just make invisible. The displacement-deformer uses a texture-tag with an animated noise-shader. Then I found a simple Xpresso-setup to extract the position of a single vertex-point in the polygon. Now I just had to connect the nulls position I want to wiggle to the vertex’ position.

I added a scene-file with a simple setup for reference. The shader in the material is simple, but shows why the simple noises in vibrate-tag or noise-node are not sufficient.

Thank you, again!
Best wishes
Markus

Yes, Markus, this is what I suggested above with the Point Node.

I would suggest to sort always the processing sequence of the nodes, which is here perhaps not really an issue, just to point it out.
https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share/MzTOW7ndrAjaj8qGfV7htRhqfxMuo6LcNu3uMFOB5qm

My impression was more that you wanted to have the option to use the values on a certain location to calm down the effect or increase it location based. So the Layer based approach would “direct” a scene for a lot of objects in a similar way for example.

With a single point read out of a noise shader (or combination) one achieves only what a rig of Nulls with Vibrate Tags attached to them could do. With such a rig one has not to move an object somewhere in the Object manager to get a Null moving. Note the options while set to Relative or not. This rig could be simpler or more complex. I would always go from large and slow to small and fast, from movement to rotation, but each set up might require a different approach.

Example:
Scene file
https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share/TB4WvdJcwPk5S1DYvfS36TJn1Hl9NoqUqLDm53croT

My best wishes