Opinions - Manipulating Points or Particles for this Effect?

Inspired by this Processing gif, I wanted to recreate it in TD.

So far, I’ve gotten the sphere environment and the inner sphere rotating, then deleting the geometry with just the points, but am having difficulty with a) manipulating the point characteristics via the Point SOP or getting the Point Sprite Mat going or b) deciding if I’m going about it all about the wrong way and should be using Particles or something else entirely? Points seems like it would be too symmetrical but it would at least enable me to alter color and sizing.

Read the wikis and would still love to hear your opinions!

Here’s what it looks like so far:
Screen Shot 2018-01-23 at 2.44.16 PM.png

Actually your example looks more like two rotating spheres both just having a black texture with (animated) white dots.

So in that case it would be a matter or creating that 2d effect of white dots in a TOP, and using that TOP in a Constant MAT applied to both Geomety COMPs (each containing one sphere)

To create those dots, look into instancing, using a Noise CHOP to get random positions.
Here’s an example with animated white dots on a rotating sphere, looking like this:

animated_dots2.gif

tip: if you click the topright icon in the parameter window of a node, you see only the parameters that are changed from the default - handy to see what I did to make this
animated_dots_texture_on_sphere.tox (1.87 KB)

Thank you, a much simpler way of looking at it!

Got to find a way to combine the outer sphere with the inner now! It becomes a little more challenging since I’m no longer dealing with just geometries; there’s no way to merge two containers so that they can be referenced into the render node, right?

I’m probably overlooking something very obvious, any pointers in the right direction would be appreciated!
Screen Shot 2018-01-25 at 3.33.28 AM.png
spaceMerge.1.toe (7.81 KB)

you’re thinking a bit too difficult.
You can add unlimited Geometry COMPs to be all rendered by a single Render TOP.

See this which has both spheres:
Spheres.tox (2.14 KB)

All I did to make this from my original version, was:

  1. copy paste the inner_sphere Geo COMP to to a new outer_sphere Geo COMP., and set its uniform scale to 10, so it’s 10 times bigger than the inner sphere.
    This means that now our camera, light and inner_sphere are all inside that outer_sphere.
  2. Then I told the Render TOP to also render this new outer sphere, by placing *_sphere in its Geometry parameter. * is a wildcard so both inner_sphere and outer_sphere are rendered.
    Done.

A next step to approach the original Processing gif could be to make the white dots on the outer sphere smaller. You can do this by either:
option 1)give the outer_sphere Geo COMP its own Constant MAT and its own texture.
option 2) inside the outer_sphere Geo COMP, connect a Texture SOP to the Sphere SOP, and on the Texture SOP enable the render and display flag (purple and blue dots in the lower right of the node) , and disable them on the Sphere SOP. Now you can play with the parameters of the Texture SOP (size for instance).

Thank you! I was compartmentalizing the different geometries too much, you’re right. And will study up on wildcard usage more! Thanks for the advice on the textures too.