Animation?

sarka.harrington · January 17, 2019, 1:31pm

I have never done animation in Grasshopper. What would be the best way/plugin to animate an object to:
-follow a path of points/curve (and control its speed somehow as it goes from point to point or curve segments)
-be able to rotate this object (in all directions) through a vector input in each point (possibly controlling speed of this rotation too)?

siemen · January 17, 2019, 1:40pm

You can use the sliders in grasshopper to make animations. If you right click on a slider there’s an “animate” button which outputs images while it’s going through the slider. You can then combine those images into a video. This has been working well for me so far.

For camera movement you can use the plugin Horster.

sarka.harrington · January 17, 2019, 1:57pm

I appreciate your reply. Would you know how to combine the sliders so I can have move and rotation in one?

siemen · January 17, 2019, 2:28pm

Yes. You can use 1 slider to control different things at once. If you make a slider going from 0.000 to 1.000 and then use the remap domain component to control the different inputs of the move and rotate component. Like so:

190117 Animate.gh (11.1 KB)

sarka.harrington · January 17, 2019, 3:08pm

Thank you so much!

maes · January 18, 2019, 9:44am

Hey !

I’m new to this forum but I’m getting very familiar with animations in Grasshopper.
Here is a simple definition for a very simple multi clip animation (move then rotate) dictated by only one slider (to animate).

There is a more presice way to actually work with duration of each clips in seconds (I will make a tutorial about that when I got some free time), but this is a good way of approaching multi clip animations in Grasshopper.

Notice that I use a (great) plugin from Daniel González Abalde (Riched Graph Mapper).
This very computer cannot save the graphs into the definition so you might need to rebuild the definition by yourself after installing the plugin (this computer is sheeeet)

If you’re interested to see what can be done in animation with Grasshopper, you can check my instagram account.

Cheers
Antoine from Belgium

SimpleMulticlipAnimation.gh (15.5 KB)

sarka.harrington · January 18, 2019, 10:28pm

Thanks for your reply Maes. Your animations on Instagram are amazing, looks like I’ll have to make an Instagram account to follow One question, how long did the animations on your Instagram take to render/export?

Michael_Pryor · January 18, 2019, 10:48pm

I notice you guys don’t make use of compounding transformations. Just so you know using X outputs and compounding will save you lots of computation time on larger animations. Making transform data doesn’t take much computation, then you just transform the object once rather than for each transformation. (note the compound component description says “combine two transformations”, but this is a typo as it combines as many as you plug in, but keep in mind the order that you plug them in is important to how you want the transformation process to work)

190117 Animate-X.gh (11.9 KB)

joev · January 19, 2019, 4:47am

Hugely helpful, thanks! Is there any way to gauge the computational savings?

maes · January 21, 2019, 9:43am

@Michael_Pryor
I didn’t really know about that x output !
Thank for the advice, I’m going to try that for the next ones !

@sarka.harrington
Thanks ! For the render it depends… Right now I’m only using the rhino rendered viewport (don’t know how to use cycles render through “animate” in grasshopper yet).
So this means they are kinda bad renders and that it’s kinda fast to animate. But some of them actually took 5h (the swirling thing one) as pipes are heavy to compute and that the loop is around 15 sec long

Jonish · January 21, 2019, 11:08am

You can also get pretty sweet animations using a modified Arctic display mode.

sarka.harrington · January 25, 2019, 9:44pm

Thanks for your reply, I love Rhino arctic mode. In order to get GH animation in arctic mode, do I have to bake the geometry into Rhino? Or can I somehow render arctic mode from GH without baking geometry?

Jonish · January 26, 2019, 10:22am

Hi Sarka,
Right now I’m not on my Rhino 6 machine, but I believe you can do that by sending your geometry to the Custom Preview component and feeding it a material name into Shader input, maybe via Value List. Don’t forget to disable preview of the rest of your Grasshopper code.

I can check later if you struggle to replicate.

Jonas

Sukey_Thomas · March 26, 2021, 5:04am

Hey @siemen, what software do you use to combine the images into a video? Iv been making gifs but am now needing to create video format for a client

siemen · March 26, 2021, 7:44am

I think what I’ve been doing was to just create a Gif and then use an online converter tool like Online GIF to MP4 Video converter to convert that gif to a video

diff-arch · April 2, 2021, 4:58pm

Hey @Sukey_Thomas and @siemen, you might want to take look at the Tapeworm Grasshopper add-on, which does exactly that and more! It’s free and open source!

Sukey_Thomas · April 5, 2021, 1:03pm

Thanks @diff-arch, Tapeworm is great! Any idea if that png/jpeg bug will be resolved at some point?

diff-arch · April 5, 2021, 1:52pm

What bug do you mean?

Sukey_Thomas · April 5, 2021, 2:08pm

This warning thing:

If I try to use JPEGs of any sort, the output video has a size of 0 kb and doesnt play…

its not really an issue, just means I will have to reprocess some jpeg files to png…

diff-arch · April 5, 2021, 2:31pm

Oh, yes, that’s a warning about a Rhino 6 bug on Windows that was fixed in Rhino 7.
There’s nothing we can do about that. No idea why McNeel didn’t/couldn’t provide a fix for version 6. In many respects, PNGs are superior to JPGs though.

If you absolutely want to have JPGs, you can export PNGs and then use Tapeworm to transcode to JPGs. You can use its Frames-to-Frames component to convert to various image formats.