Twisting Ring of Spheres
Added 2021-02-03 03:16:45 +0000 UTCI wanted to find a really simple way to recreate these kinds of animations with Houdini
https://dribbble.com/shots/11644212-MOBIUS-RIING-C4D-ANIMATION
https://dribbble.com/shots/5060881-Infinity-Circle
The twisting motion and distribution can be achieved really easily thanks to some of the more recently introduced nodes:
https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/nodes/sop/orientalongcurve.html
https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/nodes/sop/pathdeform.html
There's a little bit of VEX trickery done to handle the orientation of the spheres.
To prevent any overlapping of the sphere's radius (pscale attribute), this really handy bit of vex code is used:
f@pscale = min( f@pscale, 0.5*distance(@P, vector(point(0,'P',nearpoints(0, @P, 666.666,2)[1]))) );
Which grabs the second nearest point, (because we're querying the input geometry, the first nearest point will always be itself, or the current point so we retrieve the second element from the array using [1]) and makes sure that the pscale doesn't exceed half the distance to that point.
This is a really simple way to be sure particles aren't overlapping each other.
The texture maps I used for the spheres can be found here:
https://texturebox.com/wood-floor-parquet-texture-21
Sorry I've been unable to stream recently due to the project I'm currently on taking up too much of my time! I'm hoping to get back on track soon :)
