Swing Shift

The Progression:  The first two are the first trials from before class last Thursday.  After those, I moved to trying to make part of the particles visible.  My biggest problem, other than knowledge of the program, has been trying to decide what shapes and forms should come out of this.  The main shape has transformed many times:  array of boxes, array of cylinders, array of boxes again, one large box, geosphere, back to box, then finally back to the array of cylinders.  The object and path colliding with the particles has also taken many forms:  pill on a random string, wishbone-ish thing on random string, then deformed pyramid on a string, and finally 4 deformed pyramids on rotated helix paths.  The view has also been a concern.  The previous animations viewed the action from a perspective that could see 3 walls.  I felt that this view was less useful in this iteration because it would be difficult to tell what was going on.  I switched to a top view where one plane of shadows is visible.  I am considering trying an animation with an animated camera following just behind the colliding object just to see what happens. (Addendum: this didn’t work so well, just blobs in space.  Changed to only one object colliding with the particles in the helix pattern… ugh, I don’t know.  I watched Chris Hall’s bubbles and it’s awesome.  Mine’s lame-o for sure.)

Oh, and lighting…  in the end, there are four lights.  One of which is on a circular path to add some motion to the shadows.  It still needs some work – something is not quite working right, so ignore the flicker.

First run, before class the other day

First run with particles visible

First short, second trial 

 Second short, third trial

Third short, third trial

Latest, long run: 

Later, latest… but short… only one colliding object…  fixed lighting (maybe).

Mid-long vid of the one before…

The re-wopped final, completely different from the others: