Digital Art Zone

Hi Everyone,

I’m trying to make a visual effect where spheres are flying from the right side of the screen towards the left whilst following
a spiral path around a text.

I understand the basics of creating a path in Carrara and have the object follow that path, for example I can create a sphere
and have it fly around in an 8 pattern or something.

An example of the path I want is Browser -> Objects -> Spring 1

I tried creating a spiral path by hand and its just looks bad.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Well you could OFFEST the HOT POINT and just spin in then move it via animation key frames

I’d do what Richard just said…

Hmmm I’m not sure I understand how the Hot Point would help in this situation.

The other thing I was going to try is.

Pre replicate the spheres into a spiral and move them and have them rotate with one of the built in behaviours.

Problem is I cant figure out how to make a spiral using the “Replicator”

I can make a spiral out of spheres in Bryce using the Multi-Replicator features.  I just couldnt do the same in Carrara

I thought about exporting the object from bryce into Carrara, but I cant export primitives out of Bryce… well I couldnt figure it out.

So I’m stuck

you will never be able to create a PATH in carrara like a spiral that you like to have object follow it!  ACtual I am NOT sure what you are trying to do… if you could supply us with an image or a drawing?

grab that spring change the modeller from spline to vertex

take out the end faces, then you stick a particle emitter in one end and ....

and make the spiral invisable

and…

I can’t remember the exact details but their is a tutorial somewhere showing you how to make fire follow a certain path this way and it should work for what you want

it has something to do with setting what the objects will collide with so I’m guessing it is physics based…

and….

If I find it I will post it and it will show you the way

Are you talking about something like THIS!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crvww823ztU

oh, now all is clear!
I thought it was a Rantingrich karaoake video

RichardChaos - 02 October 2012 10:12 PM

Are you talking about something like THIS!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crvww823ztU

Thats it!!!! that looks a 1000 x times better than what I attempted to do

Not sure how the movie was done but you can do it this way

Add a THO to your scene

add a spin modifier to it

parent your ball to the THO and put it at the radius of the diameter of the path you want it to follow

move the THO to your end location.

As mentioned earlier, just offset the hotpoint of each sphere to the radius of the spiral that you need, by pressing the caps lock key and dragging it. Then align all of the sphere hotpoints to the center of your text object. Use the Spin Modifier on each sphere to make them orbit their hotpoints. Animate the spheres along the length of the text object. The spin modifier will make them follow a spiral path.

DE3AN… you got some balls there dont you!  YEA its fairly easy. Move the hot point to the center of where you want it to spiral around then animate it or the group

DE3AN how did you embed your animation? I though you couldnt do that yet in the forums?

Talk about team work Thanks to dean and everyone elses teamwork and input, I was able to get the results I wanted.

I’m going to attempt to attach the animated gif not sure if it will work or not.

So here is how I got my results.

1.  I had to figure out how to get that spiral look in Carrara.  In Bryce you can easily construct a spiral staircase using the multi-replicator function.  In Carrara the Replicator simply does not have the necessary functionality to do this.  However I found a way to do this in Carrara using the “Duplicate” function and I found this great video that illustrates how to make a stair case in Carrara. http://vimeo.com/39274672

2. Now that I had my Spiral shape, I added the “Spin” modifier to it and had it move from left to right along my text.

3. I made sure the hot point of the text (By default bottom of text), and the hotpoint of the Spiral where exactly centered using the “Motions” settings and as well using the “Left View” so I can make sure they are ligned up nice and pretty.

4. I figured out that 1 complete revolution of the spiral takes 48 Frames, so at 24 Frames per second, it requires 2 seconds of animation to do a complete loop.

I need to have this looping perfectly, but the tricky part is getting the right speed from left to right and as well as the cycles per second in the “Spin” modifier settings, otherwise you dont get the look that I’ve achieved.  I’m not sure if its a problem with the GIF loop or that I dont have something right, but it does glitch a little when it has to reloop from the start.

Comments, Suggestions would be appreciated.

RichardChaos - 08 October 2012 09:14 AM

DE3AN how did you embed your animation? I though you couldnt do that yet in the forums?

I just attached a .GIF animated file of my animation which was saved directly from Carrara with the “Infinite Loop” setting and voila it worked

Its starting to come together

I’ll post a link once the final video is done and the music has been added.