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Hash, Inc. - Animation:Master

Randomizing Settings?


Rodney

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Because this may need a little research and I don't want to waste live-Live Answer Time-time resources I'm posting this here.

I may ask this or related question during a future sessions unless I stumble upon proper solutions before then.

 

The setup: Randomizing an initial setting

Given a model placed in a choreography that moves from left to right (in simplest manner possible for demo purposes): How do we setup the model so it will appear at a random height each time the cycle repeats?

- The model should begin at the random (seeded) height then move at that same height/trajectory horizontally

- When the cycle begins again the model should appear at a new random height and move horizontally at that height.

Note: I attempt to use an expression for the random height as that is the only way I know to introduce randomness.

 

For illustrative purpose success might be demonstrated by a Gopher (single model) who randomly pops its head up through a number of holes in the ground; appearing in a random hole each time the animation cycles. This would be easy enough to animate manually but for our purpose can narrow the scope of experimentation. I am guessing that rather than see this randomness reset 'live' with each cycle it will be best to extend the length of the sequence to account for the number of 'random' appearances and then key the random element... but that isn't the imagined 'best case' scenario.

 

Need a different (perhaps slightly simpler) scenario to consider?

How about a bullet casing (single model) that randomly appears at the ejection port of a gun and spins outward from there making long cycles of the animation appear to eject dozens/hundreds of bullet casings outward.

I realize here we may be approaching a solution where particle images (displaying a sequence of images... the bullet spinning) might work well.

 

In the case (pun intended) of the bullets, the origin/location of initial appearance of the casing is only slightly offset/random.

This randomness could easily be achieved by animating the location of the bullet/model at the start of each cycle.

This forms an acceptable solution, i.e. hey, works for me!

 

At any rate, perhaps something to consider.

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The setup: Randomizing an initial setting...

 

 

I believe it can be done. On TWO I created a generic crowd character that would assume different sizes and colors and hats (?) each time it was dropped into a chor. There was a small bit of manual key-framing involved but most of the randomization was handled by the character.

 

i suspect the same concept could be re-used to make a value reset when the chor repeated.

 

hmmm... how did that work?

 

I think an expression could be used to check IF the current frame is the first frame and if it is THEN use the random function to set a value. After the first frame, the random thing never happens so the value stays stuck.

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