Cineversity

Hello
I’m trying to find a workflow to create controlled “chases” in a group of lights.  I’ve been using box falloff fields with a plain effector because it gives me accurate visual control over the group of lights I want to “turn on” or “turn off”, but the animation system I have is not ideal (see scene file below).

What I’m looking for is for a flexible system where I can control chases so that I can easily manage
1/Speed
2/Size of the chase
3/Amount of simultaneous chases happening in the same time (could be three of four “groups” of lights chasing down in the same time)
4/I need to sync this precisely to audio, so ideally it is keyframe based vs a formula

I tried this with a shader effector and a gradient shader, but animating the gradients is tricky, so I didn’t push that further.

What would be a good way to achieve this?
https://www.dropbox.com/s/1o8v2o49cesidga/ChaseAnimation1.c4d?dl=0

Thanks!

Hi Alex,

Thanks for the file and for using DropBox.

Please have a look at the files:
https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share/Jd0GUfN4GkKhK84jKP70pvVyfChSuOWdNs20mVsLF0S

Click on Mixer> User Data.

File 01 is a set up for a single Cloner. In file 02, I group all the parts (Xpresso) in an XGroup, so it can be easily stored or copied. File 03 is then set up for four groups of lights.

You mentioned that it needs to be animate-able by keyframes, so I assume the Sound Effector is not wanted. If you like to explore that, I can connect the position to the sound. Example:
https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share/jZ3JiX1iDGLVrNemkU43sCLwDk7CE5xNTjSnpAdzSSA

Let me know if you had something else in mind. I’m happy to look into it.

I have set the lights to be visible, but do not illuminate anything.

Cheers

Hello Sassi

This is great, thank you!  Amazing setup, I never thought of having Xpresso create a formula via a string concatenation…Great technique!
One question : who would you repeat a cycle?  I tried to do it with the two sliders here
https://www.dropbox.com/s/xf8kwazljxp9d5s/CV2_R23_drs_20_XPrm_02_AC.c4d?dl=0
But it is a bit clunky from an animation standpoint. I know the client will want to see a lot of variations, so I need to be able to create a series of loops where the loops are a certain size and then potentially change the size without having to to re-animate everything…Is that possible?

Thanks!!

Thanks for the feedback, Alex.

Repetition and loops are typically made with the
Timeline> Function> Track After> Repeat After.
(Select the first keyframe of the track and set up the “loop”. If the track is selected, you will find in the Attribute manager an option to set the number of repetitions.

Perhaps with loops and animation speed, the Spline adjustment works better.
Example
https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share/qPdRiUVRKt3xQd2kHtVllMbGnGZUcp37x84obcKU6gl
See image/Attribute Manager
Spline parts above 0.5 equals visible lights.

In this field, you might use a Sound Field as well (multiply perhaps on top).
The animation speed could be adjusted with sound (Xpresso)

Enjoy.

Ah yes of course!  How could I forget the timeline functions…
Thanks for that!  The only issue is that I have to modify the speed of the repetition little by little (it accelerates) but I think I could probably use a time track for that
The second solution is really interesting.  I’m confused about it though because your color remapping is just setting the color to green…How is it turning the lights on and off?  Maybe I’m missing a setting?

Thanks!!

Alex, the Plain Effector has, in this case, only one function: visibility of the clones. See image.

The acceleration of the animation is done quickly with the Animation Speed (Spline). Which by itself could be done with a Spline interface. So you could set up a nice Mixer, and have everything in on “window”.

If there is anything else, please let me know.

My best wishes for your project.

P.S.:

Perhaps not that flexible, but I had to mention it.
https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share/XjTh4NUDFlpcn1QQ8AQKmoYTJob37FCNE1jqtKxmaZ7

Based on that idea, and to overcome the inflexibility, I have set up the following:
Screen-capture, project file:
https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share/LUXshfPZc7B9i5xIyLOx39tB16yrSmpLe0BSb4ES0r6

Hello Sassi

Thanks for these! And for the previous explanation as well.

I ended up doing some of this manually because I need to be able to sync things to a changing audio rhythm.  See this screenshot
https://www.dropbox.com/s/a690fjggbihiufu/2020-12-03_11h01_22.png?dl=0

Do you think the method with the Cloner rate would work for this? 

Thanks!

Hi Alex,

Sorry for the delay in my answer, the internet was off.
The screen-shot tells me not a lot, as I have no idea what the curves express.

Cheers.

Thanks for the file, Alex, that helped to see what each parameter does.

I like to suggest an idea that I developed during the PXC time, roughly 15 years ago. It is based on Range Mappers, or roughly what I transferred from my Synthesiser days back in the days with sequencers.

Since you have many sub-sequences with different progress or regress of their parameters, but always with the same start and endpoint for each sub-sequence, this should work.

The Master-slider goes (for the subsequence) from sequence start to sequence end. With the Spline interface that changes inside that time frame can be adjusted for any number of outputs. Here I used three.

In this way, with perhaps only two keyframes for the main slider, you can set a complex “story”. (Sequencer/Synthesizer comes to mind.)

I hope that allows for a fast set up even with many beats of the song while changing a pair of keyframes changes the whole duration.

Project file
https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share/MuYzxi29fbkabme8uwLThFFMXrW9j0eBzQxnVgsvO42

Whatever range you might need, set the output values of the in and out (range Mapper) to what you need. Then Connect either their Output parameters in the Xpresso or the from the UserData (Set Driver/Set Driver)

Cheers

Ha super interesting!  Thanks for this Sassi! I’m going to dig into it and see how I can implement it in this setup.

Thanks again so much for taking them time to build this!!

Thank you, Alex!

I hope it will save you some time.

Enjoy.