[Chris Mellor]

Oh man I never noticed that Layer Maps of sprite particles has a “rotation” option! I tried what you suggested and it looks amazing. It is soooo close. I even used Colorama to map the White>Grey>Black of the Rotation Map to Black>White>Black so the rotation reads correctly.

Still one problem, and it might be the make-or-break for Form…
When the word goes into the trough of the wave, it rotates down to 30 degrees (per the Rotation Map settings). When it reaches the trough, it has rotated back to 0 degrees. This looks PERFECT. However, when the word begins to rise back to the peak of the wave, it rotates back to 30 degrees. To look natural it should be rotating to -30 degrees… I can’t image how you would accommodate this with a Layer Map, considering the Black value will have it rotate 100% in only one direction.

This is why I was originally so fixated on the Auto Orient to motion idea, because it seems the rotation will have to correspond to the movement of the particle, not based off of a 50% grey value.

Any more ideas would be appreciated. I feel like we’re so close to solving this!

Best,
Chris

-Chris

[Chris Mellor]

Sounds like you’re looking to randomly reference the “animation” variable throughout its time?

if so, define what you want your “timeOffset” to be, using another random() and re-write your last line as:
value = [posX,posY] + [0,animation.valueAtTime(time-timeOffset)];
I have been doing this in a project I am working on now, and it works for me. Hope it helps.

-Chris

[Chris Mellor]

Matthew, thanks for the response!

I am not quite sure what you mean by “use as a Layer Map for rotation”… I don’t know if that is possible within either Particular or Form. Maybe with some expressions??
Just to make sure I was coherent enough in my original post, I made a little diagram:
This is what I am trying to do:

And this is what I am getting (from Form):

Of course, this isn’t as simple as animating the Text along a path, because I also have these words spread through Z space. Hope that clarifies a bit.

In other news, I *kind of* got this to work by making literal duplicates of the word layers, randomly dispersing them on a plane with expressions, and offsetting their Y Position by sampling the luminance of the displacement map. WIth “Orient along path” on for each layer, they move like the ocean. However, the “orient along path” option is very buggy, and layers often freak out and jitter all over the place. Unless there is some way to smooth out the orientation (expressions maybe??) then I ideally should keep my approach within Trapcode or Form.

Best,
Chris

[Chris Mellor]

Thanks Marcus,

Your simple solution worked perfectly. I didn’t need the SampleImage expression at all. Instead, I placed a Tint on each layer, and modified the Tint Amount with an expression like this:

linear(position[2], -200, 200, 0, 100)

I am not very clear on what the linear() expression does… but it got the job done!

Thanks again

-Chris

[Chris Mellor]

Thanks Walker, I am still in the process of trying this (hitting many speed bumps along the way). My goal is to take the long tracking shots from Kubrick’s “the Shining” and roughly reconstruct parts of the Overlook Hotel.

I’m astonished that there isn’t more written about this. If it works, it sure could be a powerful tool.

Best,
Chris