NMC 484 Assignment #1

This is the first assignment I completed for my New Media Animation class. The criteria was to spray particles from curves. One drawback I came across was that the emitters only showed up on the vertices (the spots where I clicked to create the curve).

As the first project for the class, this was just an exploration of the emitter tools and shape transformers. On the first assignment, I found a tool in Maya called a "Vortex Field." That's what is causing the balls to spin around like a drain. Maya animates by taking "key frames" or sort of picture snapshots of where things are supposed to be or what they're supposed to do. It then mathematically fills in the in-between work, but you can tell the program how quickly you want it to happen. So I told it that I wanted it to switch from green to cyan to blue to magenta to red to yellow, and it did the rest.

For the second piece, I emitted from the circle, but then I used the circle for a motion path as well. This means that while a bunch of dots are coming from the edges of the circle, the yellow emitter is traveling around the circle. To get the magenta spiral effect, I made a straight line that an emitter oscillated back and forth on. I then made the line cycle around the circle. I like the effect, but I think that in a future project I'll make the spiral only travel inward using the cycle function.

For the third item, I decided to cut the smooth transitions for a pulsing rhythm. I also had fun with turning the circle into a square and a weird lie detector pattern. I also found an effect called a "Newton Field." It pretty much acts like a black hole or some sort of gravity point that everything falls toward. I kept the magnitude (strength) low so that the dots didn't just fall into the point.

All in all, this was fun, but I think that I spent too much time playing with the first design. It didn't leave me with much time to work on the others. I really need to do better about that sort of thing.