Between projects I often make little animations. Sometimes they’re made as a result of learning new software and sometimes I make them to test out an idea or technique.
I’ve decided that I’ll start a regular thing on this here blog – hopefully monthly – where I share some of those gifs and other little animations.
The ideas for the above gifs came from self-portrait I made for the first issue of This and That zine.
I really liked the texture I had used on the face and decided to make some random animations (similar to the ones I did for Improviz) and use the same texture. I did some post processing using Natron (e.g. the pixealation and desaturation).
On Saturday July 25th I’ll be delivering an online a Blender workshop for Access Space!
The three-hour workshop (13:00 – 16:00) will go through a few basics of using Blender but will mainly focus on making abstract glitchy looping gifs, like the ones that I made for Improviz.
I’d like to return to the fifth video in the Design Yourself series to show how i did a glowing neon trail. The video is heavily themed around robots, and if you look in the background you’ll see that it’s actually a circuit board.
The circuit diagram was a random one I built using the rather excellent Fritzing software. If you’re ever looking for high quality SVG illustrations of electrical components then Fritzing is a great resource. I brought the exported SVG diagram into Blender to illustrate it a bit.
If you look closely you can see that the circuit board has a glowing trail. To achieve this effect I followed this tutorial:
At around 6:00 the author tries to find the point where the neon trail position loops but does it visually. At first I was doing the same but then I remembered that in the past I had faced a similar problem when trying to loop the Wave texture. To get an answer for that question I consulted the Blender Stackexchange site
I adapted this a bit and came up with the following solution: To seamlessly loop the neon trail effect first insert keyframe with the Value of the Add node set to 0. Move to a point along the timeline where you want it to loop and add another keyframe to the Value of the Add node and type (0.3333*pi)/$scale (but replace $scale with whatever the Scale of the Wave texture is). My node setup is the same as in the video but here it is as well:
click to embiggen
Now when you play the animation the neon trail effect will loop seamlessly!
