It can expand and offset infinitely and with even distribution when adjusting the Period Parameter. With the Phase Parameter animated (with ‘absTime.seconds’ for example), it is seamless.
When using the Circle TOP, the typical solution for multiple offsets seems to be a feedback loop with a Transform TOP inside it, scaling and transforming the pixels to create an offset effect. This method can produce some beautiful results, but the border widths become thinner with each offset.
I explored the Replicator COMP, attempting to increment a value within its for loop, add it to each replicant circle’s radius, then composite the replicants together. So far I’ve been unsuccessful and am thinking there is likely a better way.
If there is a way to achieve the seamlessly animated, evenly distributed offsets achieved with the Ramp TOP but with the Circle TOP, I would appreciate advice. The reason I want the Circle TOP is for its Polygon Parameter and many others.
you could ttry using the ramp in h or v mode to texture a tubesop that looks like a circle, with a really tiny radius and almost no height and get a similar effect while preserving your polygon sides
Thank you kindly for your reply. This is an interesting approach I’m trying to understand. How are you suggesting the Ramp TOP set to Horizontal / Vertical be mapped to a Tube SOP?
Using a texture sop before the tube hits a geoCOMP, setting the projection to cylindrical. You may have to play with the height of the tub a bit to offset the scaling you are referring to, but in my head this should work. I might try to whip up an example next time I’m in front of my machine
This is awesome and very clever. I appreciate you sketching it up- definitely more than I was expecting.
As I played around, I started getting these artifacts on the edges of tube’s cap. Strangely, they occur only when even values are entered into the Tube SOP’s Column Parameter. Still looks cool, just not quite that clean offset repetition. With some leveling I can almost get it to disappear though.
I’m not seeing those particular artifacts, but they do look kinda cool. You can do all kinds of stuff with the texture scale in addition to treating that image in top space, and if you scale up the xtexture a bit it would probably get rid of that artifact.
The very center will likely get dirty at the pole but scaling up the texture, or even bypassing it for this particular example gets clean edges
