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Proximity / Inverse Magnetism affects position in a dynamic system
Hello all…(clears throat)…Dan and Colin,
I have done some looking into the brilliant expression work by Dan Ebberts and Colin Braley on proximity detection and repelling, but have not seen a way to accomplish what seems so simple in my head. Doesn’t everything seem so simple up there?
Above is an image of what I am working with. I want to have these circles react to each other based on how others around it are moving. The movement here is very subtle but imagine a group bubbles that push each other apart as they move through spaces or grow in spaces.
It seems there is a way to tell each layer to react (change position) to alphas other than it’s own and move at a speed according to the directional velocity of those other alphas. Perhaps making a static box around this group would help contain everything so that things don’t go flying off.
Does anyone have any experience creating a dynamic particle system like this using expressions?
Thanks so much…
Nick
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2 Replies
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I think that’s probably beyond the capability of expressions, because there’s just too much to keep track of. Expressions have no memory, so at each frame, each particle would have to recalculate its entire history since the beginning of the comp just to figure out where it should be now.
I think you could do it with a script though, assuming you could define the motion well enough to turn it into an algorithm. Unlike expressions, a script could keep track of the current postions of each particle as it goes through its frame-by-frame calculations.
Dan
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Thanks for the response Dan. I did some experimenting and even looked at the Newton plug-in, but did not have any results. There may have been too much going on motion wise for it to be visually appealing anyway so I went in another direction and your expressions for decay really helped out there.
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