Yes, it might be not possible with native tools. In the example I do not see that all points are connected with every other point. If you look carefully, they are more or less clustered. The clip shows the process of finding ideas, and perhaps focusing on certain “hot spots” during the finding process was the key here, not to connect everything with everything, which leads not to finding ideas. Focusing on good ideas leads to solutions. Hence the same happens here right now. ;o)
So how would I do that, natively? In a similar way… (brainstorming)
Several particle emitters for the hot spots to create a certain amount of particles for each. and one or more to cover with few the whole area. The position of each particle in a group can be transferred to an geometry with a certain amount of points. In this way the geometry becomes scrambled and can be used to produce these lines. (Think of the use of several objects, but each objects has the structure of points newly sorted—Structure Manager. Similar to that is the use of some splines with a fixed number of points, etc etc.)
The points itself can be ten used in a Proximal Shader do create the effect of distance and disconnecting. The larger the object grows, the more the Proximal might fade from the center among points, which neds to be animated, there is no absolute distance available inside of Proximal.
If the rendering is done in Sketch&Toons;, or with an Atom Array is of course based on tests. It could be as well simply done with all UVs set to Max (quads only!) and a gradient (Box) is placed on them in the alpha or perhaps transparency channel. (With Max, each polygon is filled with a complete gradient, and in that way the edges become separated.
That this might look much better with a more cloud like “motion blur” is not a big guess, perhaps in After Effects “Smart Motion Blur—RE:Vision” set to a very high value. Try 10 to get that “wispy” look
I assume as well to create several path for the rendering. So the post production can improve the given parts.
All of that—just brainstorming.
Yes, I know how tempting plug ins can be. Patrick pointed out the TCA Studio plug ins, the one I used for a while were nice and stable (Camera to NUKE). But I like to keep it native, even with some more work, here I have the plug ins in mind that need to stay “hot” in a scene to work. Plug ins that support the work and could be deleted after that work is done, have a much higher future value, as “you” can open a scene even many releases later without problems. I got too many “plug in not available” messages in the past 20 years—from ALL applications available, burnt fingers, not only a C4D thing for me. Check out a After Effects 3 (3 not cs3!) scene with plug ins, you might have no luck. ;o)
Good luck with the recreation of that effect.
Sassi
The attached file is just a very rough example. OR put this, after caching the points, into a HyperNURBS and use this then to project other geometry on it
