Vertical and Horizontal fades

[flyinverted]

The blue bars effect at :41 is a Morph in the NC import of SS.  The X value is set to 4%,95%  The x,y values for morph are percentages, not fixed numbers.

For my 24 leg tree, I made up a spreadsheet of the % value needed for each leg so I can start a morph on any leg I need to.

If you want the effect to appear on all your legs, just change the Morph to x1a,x2a=0 and x1b,x2b=100.

A tree with 100 legs would have the first and last 3 legs empty if using 4,95 as the x values.

[Gilrock]

I haven't had time to investigate but I do have one comment that may be relevant.  In SuperStar you are allowed to position multiple effects on the same layer during the same frame.  We don't allow that so we place the effects that appear first in the sup file on a layer and then if we find another effect we create another layer.  It's possible that in superstar the second effect is drawing above the first effect and we are drawing them in the reverse rendering order which may make things look different.  Sometimes I've manually fixed my sequences by clicking the effects and moving them to change the order of which effect is on top.  It might work better if when we create new layers that we always insert them above instead of below.  I'm just not sure.  It's difficult when their program follows different rules than ours.

[Gilrock]

Actually 4 % and 95% sounds correct for a 12 ribbon tree.  I attempt to calculate a percentage that lands in the middle of the ribbons' percentage range because I had boundary issues with the original method I was using.

[flyinverted]

Here is the direct comparison side by side. Looks good to me up to the first minute.

http://tiny.cc/3m31zx

P.S. I did not render before playing this so the effects converted to images did not show up on the preview.

[flyinverted]

I will add that while not all the effects come over 100%, it's pretty cool thing to see that Gil's code is able to bring in so much that it's more than good enough to use in a sequence. With some minor tweaking you can get it to look just like the original and like everyone else who has that sequence (BORING) 

Interesting to see the acceleration differences where the morph in the NC sequence actually gets ahead of the SS sequence. Not an issue in my book.

In the beginning the overlapping balls didn't overlap in the NC sequence as they did in the SS, but that can be fixed in NC with the layering settings. All simple stuff to fix.

The big takeaway here is that you should be finding the good parts of these sequences and saving the good effects as presets and then use them in other sequences.

[Gilrock]

Yeah I pretty much had to create my own acceleration algorithm.  I really didn't try to match superstar.  And that reminds me after Dan got the node level viewing working I could see that my negative accelerations aren't working properly.  I need to take another look at them and figure out how to fix it.

[Gilrock]

If you guys want to ask Brian for his acceleration calculation I'll make them match.

[bpducman]

I can do that

Brad

[bpducman]

I have made the request I shall let you know

[Gilrock]

By the way this is my accceleration adjustment code.  The ratio is how far along the effect is in its duration.  Then it runs into this routine to alter that percentage.  So I'm basically taking the duration percentage to the power of the acceleration.  I divided by 3 because it seemed too strong.  What it ends up doing is slowing down the start of the effect.  So you input 20% and you get out about 7.5% but by the time you hit 100% you are even because 1 to the power of anything is 1.

double RgbEffects::calcAccel(double ratio, double accel)
{
     accel /= 3.0;
     if( accel == 0 ) return 1.0;
     else if( accel > 0 ) return std::pow(ratio, accel);
     else return (1 - std::pow(1 - ratio, -accel));
 }

[bpducman]

I think I like it better when its magic 

[Gilrock]

One things that's pretty cool is drop down a morph and then expand so you can see the nodes and then adjust acceleration and watch what happens on the nodes.

[bpducman]

Yea the whole thing is pretty cool. But I think you need to give me a little more info how do you drop down so you can see nodes I see where you can make acceleration adjustments.

[Gilrock]

Double-click the row heading for a model and it will reveal the strands.  Double click a strand and it will reveal the nodes for that strand.

[JonB256]

When I open up a text editor it looks like something I would print out and rap around my head and go screaming down the street!

What text editor do you use?

Thanks
Brad

We all pretty much use Notepad ++ for editing XML files like this. It will automatically organize and parse the files, making them much easier to read. You will probably just "shout and walk around the room."

https://notepad-plus-plus.org/