trails & exporting chops

Beginners
1

So I’m having a look at trails to see what they do and stumble into a problem.
The scenes attached so I’ll talk through what I’m doing.
I have a cube, I’m rotation transforming it and using a trail to ‘connect as polygons’. So far so good, I get a nice shape appearing - so I want to take it a step further and change the shape by inputting different sums to rotate by. I have two constant chops containing the sums and a switch. Problem: soon as I export the sums from chop to transform sop the trail doesn’t work. It doesn’t seem to pick up the input coming from the chop export.
trails_and_cube.3.toe (8.17 KB)
trails_and_cube.3.jpg

2

Hey,

same here. You can get around that bug by not exporting to the Transform CHOP but using expressions to fetch the channels from the Null CHOP.

Add this expression to the rx parameter of you Transform SOP and modify the channelname for ry and rz accordingly:

chop("null1/rx")

Let me know if this works for you.

Cheers
Markus

3

lovely, yes, works a treat.

My plan was to have a lag after the switch to create a tween between the switch from constant a to constant b so it’s not an instant jump as it is now. I’m sure you can see the obvious flaw that I’d missed - the values are already animated so the lag couldn’t be used without it messing up the oringinal shapes. I’ll have to put some more thought into this one but thanks for pointing out how to bypass that bug for me!

cheers,
Tom

4

Hey,

for this the Blend CHOP might be helpfull…

cheers
Markus

5

Yes the blend CHOP is just what I was looking for! The user can now animate a tween/blend using a constant chop as a slider. Cool.

cheers,
Tom
trails_and_cube.4.toe (8.31 KB)

6

hey tom,

just some optimization tips. if you put the point SOP before the transform1, you can save some CPU cycles. And doing the final rotation in geo1 instead of transform3 should also be a bit faster

7

Cheers Achim! Useful tips there, I do need to be more aware of optimisation (excuse my english spellings) generally. Nice one for highlighting these tweaks.

8

With the point SOP adding colour before the trail & transforms, I’m not getting a consistent green colour coming through. Why is this?

9

I’ve added a sine wave to animate the blend but I’m getting weird results… When I animate with the mouse in the same way it’s fine. Resampling the wave at lower intervals didn’t solve it…
trails_and_cube.10.toe (8.57 KB)