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Creating a Point Mesh Based on Luminance or placing thousands of nulls?
Hello all,
So I’ve been trying to create a network video similar to this: https://vimeo.com/20205285.
Basically this point mesh for plexus was created in Cinema using Luminance of a texture to designate the selected points and then exported as an OBJ. I have had no success trying to get this method to work.
The next thing I tried is placing nulls manually along the surface of a textured sphere (using a constrain tag) according to the cities lights at night (see pic).
Basically this works for a bit and then Cinema gets bogged down with the amount of nulls present and it becomes too slow to work with.
I would be fine if either way would work. The OBJ way I think would be ideal but I couldn’t get it to work. I’m fine with placing the nulls but it get’s too bogged down.
If anyone has any solutions for either of these techniques please let me know. If you have a solution for the OBJ/Mesh please give me step by step if you can.
Thanks for any and all comments.
Best,
Dan
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5 Replies
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I would do it with MoGraph. Here’s how:
1. map your texture onto the sphere (in material’s luminance channel);
2. create a cloner with a small cube (converted to geometry) as the cloned object and set the cloner to object mode (targeting the sphere) and the method to surface;
3. for now, turn on render instances in the cloner (speeds things up);
4. create a shader effector, turn off the default scale parameter, and turn on the visibility parameter;
5. in the shading tab, set the channel to luminance;
6. now turn up the clone count to a very high number and hope that you don’t run out of ram. 🙂
7. when you get the clone density you need, turn off the render instance box in the cloner and hope you don’t run out of ram.
8. if all went well, make the cloner editable, select all the clones, and run the connect + delete command. That will create a single object from all your clones that can then be exported.
Example: 4085_citylights.zip
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Hi Adam,
Thanks for your help this works great. I did run into a little snag but I think I found a solution.
When I export the OBJ out of cinema, plexus reads the polygons of the sphere in addition the the light points, also the cubes don’t really translate well into plexus.
So I created a single point polygon by deleting the other points on the cube, made the cloner editable, which created a ton of render instance objects, unchecked render instance for all of those objects and made all of those editable which then created the mesh. Also I deleted the sphere as well.
Hopefully that makes sense, if you have another solution please let me know, again thanks for your help on this.
Best,
Dan
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Now that I think of it, it might be faster to use Thinking Particles’ Matterwaves node to generate the geometry. For this one you just need to make the particle geometry object editable and then connect all the points into one object.
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Thanks Adam,
This works as well. I’m having trouble laying in a new sphere with the texture and having the particles react. I’m not that familiar with Xpresso but I have a feeling I’m doing something wrong. How would I go about setting this up from scratch?
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The main thing is to specify the texture and UVW tags in the matterwaves node. Not a whole lot more to it, really.
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