Blog 2 Animation

So for this assignment I was interested in playing with using points to control movement. My first idea was to play with squiggly lines that would overlap and create some sort of interesting animation. I'll apologize about this throughout the blog, but with this piece I just got really in the zone and forgot to take screenshots of my progress so I've tried to recreate them in some images, but I'm sorry if they aren't 100% accurate to the process!!

So I started with making points on the plane that made somewhat of a staircase pattern, and input that into the X and Y values of the points, then have the slider range to a point with a difference of about 40 and added an  to see what would happen. I also added in a -1 multiplier  And this is where I have to apologize because I got caught up in what I was doing and forgot to take screen shots of the initial results, but I ended up with a sideways zigzag.

I took this line and then plugged it into an offset, then added a secondary offset with a -1 multiplier to have the offset come off both sides of the line. I plugged these into a remap so that the thickness could change as the animation played, I set the values from -20 to 20 so that it would look like the shape got thin to the point of disappearing as the shape changed, then reappeared as it changed. But, I found that the offset lines didn't connect to each other, I had originally wanted the shape to look like a thick zigzag so I was disappointed by this. So, by playing with different tools I came across the end tool and used that to find the ends of each offset and attached that to a line tool to try to make a singular shape. I couldn't get the ends to connect in sequence so instead I connected ends to ends and starts to starts which created the series of overlapping boxes I ended up with. I attached these to a join tool to make the lines into closed curves and attached that to a boundary tool to make them into shapes. 

I then just added a preview tool that attached to a gradient tool that I connected back to the main slider to have the colour change as the shape changed and added a slider to the transparency so that I could set them to a nice level so that the overlapping shapes could be seen.

But, at this point the shapes I had weren't very nice looking at the end of the animation, and I wanted an overlapping secondary shape to add some contrast. So I duplicated the above work and tried adding 40 to all of the values. I was not happy with those results so I tinkered with the x and y values on both shapes until at the start and end of the animation the lines created nice geometric boxes instead of lopsided shapes. Again, I have to apologize because through this whole process I was focused on the work and forgot to take screenshots. But eventually I got what I wanted. 

Once I got to this point I was fairly happy with the animation but I just wanted a little bit more, so I replicated both of the shapes and added a rotation of pi to each one so that it would make more of a symmetrical feeling piece instead of just an animation of a couple shapes. 

I did have some trouble when it came to actually inputting it into the gif converter though. Firstly and most obviously, I ended up with some black spots and weird animation over certain areas of the image, unfortunately I couldn't find a way to solve this. The other issues though were just timing and looping. I wanted the starting and ending shapes to be more visable so I added 7 frames at the start and end of the animation to give a moment to see them. Then to make the looping reverse so that the movement was smooth I went into the effects section of the gif tool and added a "run to the end and reverse back to the start". 

Overall, outside of the animation glitches I'm really happy with how it turned out and had a great time playing with the tools to create this shape. 

Here's my grasshopper fine as well to see all of my processes!