Chaining different effects / Making transitions for longer projects

[Alesk69]

Hi everyone,

My question to yourselves is : how do you chain together within TD different animations ?
I’m working on a project that involves different effects, for example the beggining is a box rotating, the 2nd part are some particles, then some text etc.

I haven’t found out to make smooth transitions between these effects to make the all thing look like a continuous movie, with nice transitions between the different effects.

The way I’ve done it so far is to fade in/out to black the effects, export them and then use a movie editing application to chain them one after the other, but the result is boring, and it doesn’t look like a true animation.
Most of the work made with TD I’ve seen (mostly on social networks) so far involve only one effect but I’m sure it’s possible to make a long project with different effects, with nice transitions between them in TD but how ?

If anyone could help me it would be greatly appreciated!
Cheers!

[luxnaut]

Here’s a .tox I made for some students of mine that switches between different TOP inputs, but it simply uses a cross to fade to the next input after a period of time that you manually set. If you’re trying to make custom animations, you’d have to design those yourself. But hopefully this helps!

sceneSwitcher.tox (2.3 KB)

[FaustoB]

One way to think about this, is rethinking parts of the project structure, and reconsider what’s at the source of your shapes and effects.

What I mean is, if for example in your sequence / animation you have a square that then becomes a circle, I would make the square using a circle operator, so that I have some options for shifting from one shape to another.
Or for example the square is made in a way that each straight segment connecting the 4 points can bend freely, to eventually make a circular form or a perfect circle.

If the circle then needs to eventually become particles, you could think about a way to bring in the particles at some point perfectly aligned over the circle, for example with a force that keeps the particles “glued” to the circle, and then you can “free up” the particles manipulating those forces.

It depends on your scenario, and this type of approach might be too late to implement or not appropriate for your use, but could be something to consider.

I hope this helps

[Alesk69]

Many thanks for your reply and the interesting example you provided! That’s not exactly what I am looking for at the moment, but that’s definitely an approach that could be useful to me in the future.
Thank you again, have a great day !

[Alesk69]

Thank you very much for your reply! That’s actually the type of approach I’m trying to have, the problem I’m facing is how to chain all this together without having a huge network of operators.
Do you use a single network to make long animations ? How do you organise your network?
To be honest I haven’t looked yet very much into Containers or Base COMPs. Maybe that’s the way to go? Otherwise I might end up with a network with hundreds of operators, no?

Have a great day !

[FaustoB]

@Alesk69

Do you use a single network to make long animations ? How do you organise your network?
To be honest I haven’t looked yet very much into Containers or Base COMPs. Maybe that’s the way to go? Otherwise I might end up with a network with hundreds of operators, no?

The first project I did in TD was inevitably a big, massive spaghetti bowl. I thought I could navigate it clearly, until it became so huge that it was a nightmare to untangle.
One single network with everything in it are visually very hard to read, are very hard to troubleshoot, they make very hard to handover the project to someone else (a collaborator, or someone touring with the show for example) and extremely hard to re-familiarize with after the project is ended and for example gets picked up again a year later.

Definitely, Base and Container COMPS are a the way to go.
I am quoting the great @elburz here: “good networks look boring” (from his course Project Architecture, you should check it out if you are interested, link) and I could not agree more with that statement!

I always compartmentalise in my projects, no matter how small or big they are.

Here below some screenshot of a project that I just finished a couple of weeks ago and handed over to a technician for touring.

inside project1, at the upper level, my network for that project looks like that.

it depends on the project but usually:
#1 on the left I have my inputs (could be mouse, a joystick, OSC, MIDI, whichever )
#2 in the center the fun bits (processing, the visuals, effect etc…).
#3 to the right the output, in this case 2 video projectors but could be output to lighting, to the web, OSC out…anything that goes out
#4 at the bottom I usually have the UI.

Inside INPUT it looks like this

inside OSC IN it looks like this

inside VISUALS it looks like this

inside COMBINE it looks like this

inside Simple Blend

and so on.

it looks very boring! but it’s easy to trouble shoot, it’s easy to read, and it makes easy to reuse bits and pieces when I need them for other projects.

I hope this helps!

[Alesk69]

Wow this really helps!

Thank you so much! It gives me a very clear idea on how to organise a proper network. I never imagined a network would look like this in the end. Thank you very much for all the details and pictures ! I will definitely check the link.
I need to familiarize myself with this method of working.
Thank you very much for your time and all the advices! That’s amazing!

Have great day!