Comment by Synthetik Software on September 7, 2010 at 10:07am

Here's a link to liveart's city traffic video that inspired me to play around with time particles and MSG geometric transformations to build a paint animation.

There actually 2 different geometric transformations that were used to build this. I first build a dualmode paint preset using time particles and a very small geometric rotation for the MSG processing. I let that render out using loop action. I then processed that movie file using a second MSG geometric scaling transformation. The scaling transformation keyframes over time (the amount of scaling changes over time).

I could have incorporated this scaling transformation into the original render cycle, but the results are very different. It's the difference between recursive and non-recursive processing. The frame capture below shows what happens if you use recursive processing (using one render pass with both geometric transformations as opposed to 2 passes).

Note that the visual effect of recursive vs non-recursive processing when using a geometric transformation is very different. I'll post a link to a video example a little later after it uploads.


I also wanted to point out that the creative approach i was following when working on what lead to this paint animation is very similar to the Darwinian or evolutionary model of creativity recently discussed in the 'what is creativity' forum post. Creativity being thought of as a 3 step iterative cycle of Copy - Modify - Evaluate and Select.

I started by copying Liveart's approach to building a paint animation from using time particles and geometric transformations in a dual mode preset. I modified what he was doing, editing both the time particle paint preset and the MSG geometric processor and it's associated editable parameters. After modifying my 'copy', i evaluated the visual results of the kind of paint animation that was generated by the underlying process. I continued this iterative cycle over time until i ended up with the paint animation above.

Note that the notion of 'copying' initially was occurring at a meta level, i copied the idea Liveart was using to create his animation but not the specific presets he was using. But once i had a specific set of presets i was working with, my copies were much more literal, being edited variations of specific dual mode or PASeq presets i had generated.

The other thing to note is that the resulting animations are generative. What you work on when creating the animations is not the final animation itself, you're editing the parameters of a generative process that will later create the paint animation on it's own. So you never directly work with the final generated imagery, you setup a procedural process that when run generates the final visual imagery that makes up the paint animation.

Comment by Synthetik Software on September 7, 2010 at 10:35am

Here's a link to the short recursive processing example i mentioned above. Note that it looks very different than this animation. Again, this is because the 2nd geometric transformation was run as a second processing pass for this animation, as opposed to the single pass recursive processing that occurs in the linked animation.

Comment by Synthetik Software on September 7, 2010 at 10:54am

I also wanted to point out one paint synthesizer feature i'm using with my time particle paint preset used in this animation. I wanted the original time particle coloring to not change as the paint animation progressed. So the individual paint time particles would have the same color as they moved around over a series of frames. To do this, you can go to the Paint Source Offset control panel and edit the Tracking so that it tracks the Time PArticle Start Point. If you have a static image as your source, then the time particle coloring will always reference their start color from frame 1 when this Tracking option is turned on.

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