Experiment Challenge - Finis

[Finis]

Interesting idea Steinie! Hopefully there will be some participation. I'm learning Blender so I'll try to do something with it.

I want to do something with Blender's node editor since I haven't used nodes before. I'll try a simple node powered animation. First I'll try to make a cube with many small pebbles on and around it. It will start vibrating and that will move the pebbles. I haven't seen vibration in an animation before.

My first idea was to model something completely by using nodes! That would be interesting since I currently can't model anything the normal way without referring to a tutorial. The node editor is for materials, animation and compositing but I found no reference to modifying meshes.

I also considered trying camera tracking.

When I'm reasonably competent with Blender I have a small, unambitious, modest independent project in mind (link).

Another idea for an independent project using vibration and various simulations and physics. "Over Caffeinated". Coffee pours into a cup. The coffee is "supercaf" brand or something like that. The cup starts vibrating from holding such powerful coffee. The cup vibrates more vigorously until it either explodes or melts or both and the coffee spills on the table ... the table starts to vibrate.

Challenge thread here.

[Draise]

I highly recommend the Animation Node add on for animation and modifying meshes with the node editor in Blender. It works. I've used it and it's a lot of fun.

[Finis]

Yep, I'm liking the animation nodes. Tutorials usually used a noise modifier on some curve somewhere. I'm doing this with animation nodes so I didn't try that. There are randomizer nodes and wiggle nodes. The randomizers made the movement too sharp or harsh so wiggle it is. I chose to use the vibration on the rotation because I think that will make a cool effect on the pebbles.

Experiments: trying different settings in wiggle nodes and different ways to hook them up and trying random vs wiggle. I could add nodes that are just number values to feed all the amplitude and speed settings for easier adjustments. I'll try to find other inputs than the frame so the frequency of the vibration can be faster. It is fast enough now but that will be interesting to try.

Next: particles and physics to make a pile of pebbles on and around the cube.

Later:
Experiment - vibration interacting with particles.
Result - the vibrating cube does move the particles.

Experiment - make a pile by raining particles on objects.
Result - Particles don't have self collision. There is an add on called molecular and others to deal with this but I'll try rigid body physics instead.

[Finis]

No more time for this so here it is. Download the movie below. I've played with animation node settings, learned a little about rigid body physics, learned about making arrays of objects, and made a movie of the results. I couldn't get the Blender Renderer to work so this is a Cycles render. Eleven seconds per frame but BR would probably have been faster and fine for this purpose.

I added a clamp node to choose the start frame of the vibration animation. I also added two nodes to feed the speed and amplitude in the wiggle nodes. That way I could adjust that without changing it in each wiggle node. I read that Octaves adds detail to the wiggle so that was increased a little.

I'm removing my content from my Youtube channel and might close the account so the movie is attached. The balls begin in a rectangular grid above the cube and fall onto it. The ground is like a bowl to keep the balls close to the cube so the effect of the vibration on the balls can be seen. That ground is my first Blender model! I divided a plane into several polys, selected some and moved them to make a dip. I found the various controls that effect render quality, size, and speed and played with them to get a fast render. A rigid body physics setting that is important is Physics:Rigid Body:Sensitivity:Margin. I played with that so the objects seem to touch but don't penetrate surfaces.

Blender's UI is not friendly of course but I find that memorization is the key to learning it. It is not that hard to learn but playing with it is not a way to learn for beginners. Watch beginner videos and study the manual. The shortcuts you use most are easily learned through monkey see monkey do (Suzanne see Suzanne do? The Blender monkey is named Suzanne). Do what you see in a tutorial. Although it does have organization sometimes it makes no sense and you just have to memorize the shortcut or how to navigate to it on the menus or panels. Supposedly, everything is available without shortcuts but when I encountered Cntrl-Alt-Shift-P (not kidding, maybe it was a different letter) in a tutorial I could not find that function anywhere. I did find a better way to do the task though. I intend to learn the modeling shortcuts.

While use Blender I realized that the interface is not a User interface. It is a Programmer interface. I used to do this too. A programmer working on a project might make a screen full of everything related to a program or part of it so he can test and tune every tiny detail. In a User interface much of that would be inaccessible or would be in a "drill down" with the most used things first and increasing detail/control on request.

[Draise]

The vibrating box is quite humerous. Looks like you are catching on fast. Animation Nodes are easy right?

[Dragneye]

That's cool Finis. Haven't touched Cycles or Nodes myself. Maybe it's time.

I've wanted to see if I can somehow create my own button list/panel with just a few commonly used options, avoiding the searching. It is a quite scattered, things that should be closer together in the panels. As for hotkeys, my rule is if it takes more than two fingers I don't memorize.
I just looked down...
One finger - TAB SHIFT CTRL ALT ZXCBMASDGHKERYIP 1,3,5,7, F11, F12, ESC
Two fingers - CTRL/P, G plus XY or Z.
lol... that's the whole extent of my keyboard usage with Blender, covering modeling, rigging, animation.

[Draise]

You should try out Bforartists.de, it's a very modified version of Blender with the artist in mind.. still heavily in development but it has a former trueSpace user working on it.

[Finis]

"TAB SHIFT CTRL ALT ZXCBMASDGHKERYIP 1,3,5,7, F11, F12, ESC" That shortcut applies an orange material right?

I tried to apply the nodes to multiple objects. Changing the object selected in the Object node gave it the vibration but I found no way to apply this machine/system to multiple objects. I'd prefer to feed the system into an array or list of objects or groups of objects, or feed that into the system, so they would all vibrate. Individualized vibration would be good too so they would not all move in unison.

I still can't get the Blender renderer to work on this. It is just gray no matter what I do. New scenes work with BR or Cycles so I did some thing in this scene that broke BR. I'd like to use BR for fast development then Cycles for final renders when its realism is the goal.

Unrelated Blender activity: I tried to get particle hair to collide with a character. Blender's particle system does not work with the physics system well, if at all, and the normal particles don't interact with each other. The hair just goes through a character even if "collision" is on in the physics panel. A tutorial said to use force fields instead and showed an acceptable example of it working. I tried that and found it requires much trial and error to discover the important settings and adjust them. Maybe the force field technique would have worked on particle balls. Still tuning my test. May the force fields be with me!

[Finis]

See the video here (link).

[Dragneye]

Hmmm... never tried them all together. In theory, it should then come up with a complete model, no?

Finis, your 'unambitious, modest' project looks quite a challenge. You're thinking of modeling that?

In Blender I have found when changing between the two renderers, it ruins... somethng. It seems to lose the color info. Also, when in B render there's a button in the Colors Tab that supposed to activate sharing of info blocks between it and Cycles I think. Click that?

Draise, will check out 'Bforartists.de'. Thanks.