Sending shapes in to a disapearing spriral

[ben]

The reason it starts going crazy is that you are setting the Period of the Wave CHOPs to be a negative number. Period is clapped at 0.001 and must be a postive number. When the Period is 0.0001 the wave is very short and makes it look erratic.

I added a Math CHOP to make the values always positive. I also cahnged you're setup a bit so that the exporting is happening outside the TUK components from Null CHOPs, just so it is easier to work with and inspect what is happening.

Hope this helps, however changing Period of the Wave CHOP will always make the wave jump to the new length, so that might cause issues down the road for you.

Scene 1 - Image Collage with rotation.15.toe

(18.04 KiB) Downloaded 4 times

[jinglejedi]

OK, I have been able to successfully build a sequence that allows an object to move along the z axis into the distance, rotate in a circular fashion with x and y waves that can be varied on the fly with changing amplitude (using X CHOP with varying values by slider) and varying speed of rotation (currently done by X CHOP values fed to the period value). This has been done from both an x and y wave. There fore the circle of rotation gets bigger and smaller simutaneously from one slider.

It works fine if you set it to a particluar value and let it go. You can vary the z with smooth transitions and also vary the size of the circular motion and it still looks smooth. The main problem I'm having now is when you vary the period value it resets the wave back to it's starting point which makes the geo flicker all over the place and it is not smooth. Once you let it go at the new speed, it's fine.

My question is, what is a way to vary the speed of my waves without causing the new wave speed to reset back to it's staring point? Or perhaps there is a way to speed up and slow down my animation without doing it through the wave CHOP values. Could I somehow do it after that process? It would be handy if there was an OP that just speeds up my frame rate. Whatever way... I want to accelrate the rate of spin with time.

[teflonjf]

Here's a few ideas on how to fix your issues . . .

The flicker issue caused by changing the wave period can be solved using a Filter CHOP. I left it at defaults, which seems to work fine in this case. The Lag CHOP can also be used to smooth out motion.

One way to handle increasing the speed is to use the Trigger CHOP with some math adjustments as a varying value into the Speed CHOP. Adjust the attack length in the Trigger to change the duration of the motion, adjust the math values to change the acceleration of the rectangle.

[greg]

I had a brief look. Some pointers:

Instead of making up a Wave CHOP with a lot of waves repeated and re-cooked based on the speed (exporting to the Period of the Wave CHOP), I would do this:

Make the Wave CHOP be one period long (set Period to 10). Send your Spiral Speed to a Speed CHOP (like you do elsewhere). Then send that and the Wave CHOP to a Lookup CHOP and from there you can adjust the speed and get smooth results. Make your amplitude be exported to the Math CHOP after the Lookup, not the Wave.

Two Waves CHOPs, one Phase-shifted from teh other, can be Merged into one CHOP that feeds the Lookup.

Your Movie In that is inside the blur component I would put outside the component and plug the Movie In to its input, just to make it more apparent where your texture is coming from.

It comes up with the right-half of the screen covered by your right-monitor image. This can be avoided using the new way in TouchDesigner to display on several monitors.... the Window Component, so I would turn off the Monitor 2 flag in Window Placement and use a Window compoentn and set it to displayon Monitor 1 or wherever. At Derivative we're still retrofitting all our .toe files to use this method with Windoew components, so we apologize for .toe files with the former technique.

What you do is correct already - there are so many ways to do things in TouchDesigner that the best ones come through experience and seeing other people's work.

good stuff,
greg

[jinglejedi]

Thanks for the pointers. It looks a lot cleaner now and seems more intuitive. I know some of my stuff must seem a little sloppy to some of you seasoned Touch users!

I am now able to control the size of the spiral with a slider varying the multiplier on a math CHOP (Instead of an XCHOP tied into the wave amplitude). However I am now unsure as to how I can control the speed of the rectangle after the lookup CHOP. I do indeed have an extrmely fast rotation that I somehow need to slow down with varying values from my slider. Which operator gives me this function?

Marc.