[Joshua Stearns]

Thanks Stefan,

This tutorial isn’t the bit I was looking for, but it’s still a useful effect, and I may incorporate it into this project. The part I’m looking for still is the keyboard itself, rather than what would be on screen. A dynamic animation of the keys being pressed as the text types on.

[Joshua Stearns]

Hate to say it, but we’re without TP as well. In fact, I do beleive that our shop has no added modules whatsoever. It’s terribly frustrating.

My thanks though, Adam, for taking the time to find a solution. Our art director has informed me that it’s been added to the budget to get us the other modules sometime this year, so hopefully that will happen, and even though this particular project’ll probably be long past, I’ll come back and check this out. I can always use more Xpresso knowledge.

In the meantime, though, if you or anyone else has a solution that will work in the primitive environment I’m in, I’d love to hear it. 🙂 If not, no big deal.

Progress:
Just figured I’d post what I’ve learned so far. (Aside from how badly our shop needs to purchase MoGraph or Thinking Particles.)

I’ve found that the vibrate tag will not go into ObjectList nodes, but will go into a Link List node.

While animating frequency on vibration tags and noise nodes, they’ll pause if you drop it to zero, and start up again from the same place. The problem is that it doesn’t want to animate properly between the values. I guess there’s some strange quirk in the way it’s calculated.

I found one solution for stopping and starting the motion. I linked my objects (named “1”-“7”) to 7 nulls (named “1”-“7” also) using a PSR Constraint on the y position only. Each null is hooked up to it’s own noise node with the seed varied on each. The weight of each Constraint is linked to one, so only one has to be keyframed. By animating the weight, I can bring them out of synch or back into synch with the nulls. – Unfortunately, this solution still lacks the elegance of your TP solution, since each null has to be manually linked up to a noise node. I guess I could use vibrate to the same effect, to at least save on Xpresso. But the random seed still has to be set for each one. Then the PSR constraints have to be manually set up for each one. I honestly think it’d be less trouble to manually keyframe them rather than do this. If Xpresso can streamline or replicate that process, though, this might be viable.