Brian Cain

Taking the flocking to the next step I decided to see how I could have music control different aspects of the flocking. There is a way to link mograph effectors within Cinema 4d into xpresso. You have to use the Sample Effector.

Here is an example of the music controlling the size of the flock and the size of the blocks:

For this one, I thought I’d go for something a little less abstract, yet ad a twist with the music controlling the flocking. I wanted the fluttering of the fishes tails to be proportional to their speed. Multiple ways of solving this problem were explored, yet no result was found. In order to get the tail to go back and forth without keyframes, I used a formula effector from mograph to create some useful pulsing values to move a bend deformer back and forth.

I tried changing the formula by using a variable that was hooked up to the same sound frequencies that were driving the flocking, that way, if the fish went faster from music, the pulsing fishtail would too. That didn’t work so well because every frame would be a new formula, and the tail would not make it through a full cycle, just lots of flicking fins. The other problem with the fish tail is that they all syncronized and not individual. There isn’t a particle input on the bend deformer, so it would just tell the reference bend deformer to update, and all of the instances would update together. Because of these problems yet to solve, I moved beyond literal fish.

Finally, I have a more abstract piece, yet I think its more visually interesting. Here I’ve incorporated a different mograph effector that creates splines from a moving object. I’ve also improved some on the gravity response to the music too.

As part of my experimentations with Xpresso for my Virtual Entertainment class, I have been working with Thinking Particles to try and emulate flocking birds. This started with research into what has been already done. The biggest help came from Tim Clampham, who had a basic flocking setup with Xpresso started. The problem was that in his example, he used big spheres to work as deflections for the birds to go around, and it doesnt look very natural. My first goal was to try and fix that problem.

Here the result looks a bit more natural. I used 4 different spherical gravities placed in the path of the birds similar to the way that the original used deflections. There is still the problem however of getting the individual birds to behave more individually. They all turn at exactly the same time, and more importantly are all going about the same speed.

In this example, I have removed the 4 gravity nulls from the path of the birds so that the changes are more apparent. Here I attached the position of a gravity sphere to the current particle group. This way there is a gravity sphere that stays within the flock. The result was unexpected. The birds stay in a group, but seem to sort of revolve around each other. It makes the flock look even more natural, however the way that they revolve around each other seems to look predictable. If on one side of the flock there are a number of birds moving upward, on the other side the same amount are moving down.

In this example, I have kept the following gravity sphere, but added a sin formula to it so that it fades in and out, making the swarming flow of the internal flock less consistent and predictable. Also, I have added another emiter from the same location with the same settings, except it emits just 1 particle. I have attached another gravity sphere to it and this also has the pulsing formula to it. With this second gravity sphere, it makes the flock grow and shrink.

Here in my final experiment, I have added back the 4 spheres of gravity. These in addition to the internal swarming effects of the flock, makes for a pretty natural Thinking Particle flocking system within Cinema.

I have yet to create any motion graphics pieces that involve compositing. After some looking around I found this video, which uses synth eyes for motion tracking.

I tested it out with some very simple handfilmed video from my digital camera. I was pretty easily able to put a floating cube in the room and have it match up.

Based on this test, I want to do a bigger experimental piece.

Motionographer.com isn’t any sort of awards site; however, it is a well known hub for motion graphics pieces to be featured and discussed.  When I decided to do a type piece for my portfolio, I automatically thought of a student piece which was featured on motionographer.  This piece was well recieved and it gave me something to aspire to as a student.

I’m proud to say I have been featured on motionographer

Motionographer had 2 interesting articles pointing to interesting ways to visualize data.  These link have come in handy while thinking of what sort of way to make an artistic visualization through generative art.  My source of data has been established.  I will use excel data from the United Nations so that it can easily be converted into a useful format.  It appears after some research that Processing is capable of reading data from a file which is separated with tabs.  How convenient that Excel exports tabular data.  The next step is to see what Processing is capable of offering in combination with what I’m capable of learning to produce a great piece within the next two weeks.

The internet has been buzzing about Ron Paul since before the beginning of the year. The internet cares about Ron Paul. This is easily seen when you compare number of people subscribed to each of the candidates channels. Ron Paul’s is over 36,000, while Barak Obama is at 12,000, followed by Hillary at 6000. That, in addition to the fact that the internet audience is the fuel behind viral advertising, makes it a pretty obvious pick for a topic that has the potential to go viral.

It is much more difficult to find negative information about Ron Paul than it is to find positive information; however, he has some big flaws that are quite hard to see why they were overlooked.

An RIT redesigned site has gone live today which I made a contribution to. The Academic Affairs website has a flash visual navigation system on the home page. Below you can see my contributions to the motion and feel of the interface.

Here’s what I started with:

More cursor dependent:

better scaling:

Added transparency, smoother animation if mouse movement is fast (exaggerated):

Final piece – preloader (for those not on Internet2 speeds), and the figures will all return to the default size regardless of how fast you move your mouse off of the SWF (unlike the previous examples):

Wedding Crashers: The Perfect Girl