Gif Pack #1

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).

Seamless Looping Neon Trail in Blender

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!