Tutorials

    Recipe 50: Branching


    General Principles

    • Animating OpenGL objects
    • Using audio to drive motion
    • Working with jit.path for smooth motion

    Commentary

    After the RoboMoves recipe, I wanted to try a slightly more complex structure and work with a simple audio responsive motion control. The repeated, branching structure of a tree provides the basis for this animation patch, and we use the amplitude of an incoming audio signal to scrub around the animation. While this recipe follows much of the same structure as RoboMoves, the effect of this is really different.

    Ingredients

    • jit.path
    • jit.anim.node
    • jit.gl.light
    • jit.gl.material
    • jit.gl.gridshape

    Technique

    First, we'll look at the structure of the animation nodes. To create the tree, I created a repeated branching pattern with each parent node having 2 child nodes. By scaling the each jit.anim.node, we get a structure where the children keep getting smaller as we go down the hierarchy. The nice thing about this sort of repeated branching structure is that it was mostly just duplicating and connecting objects to get it set up. If you wanted to make it even more complex, all you need to do is add in another layer or two of branching children.
    To animate the tree, we use jit.path, just like in RoboMoves, but instead of a looping counter, we have a peakamp~ object driving the eval message. The bline is there to smooth out the transitions and make it a little less hectic looking.

    by Andrew Benson on
    Apr 26, 2012 8:50 PM