Move sphere along random path animation, variable accelaration

Hi there! I would like to be able to record an animation corresponding to the sequence described below:

  1. Determine Point A by defining a random point on a given canvas. For the sake of this example, let’s assign a small sphere to this point
  2. Determine Point B in a similar manner
  3. Move the sphere from Point A to Point B, with the sphere travelling towards its destination at an accelarating velocity (thinking a graph mapper can be used to achieve this, I want the movement to feel snappy as if the sphere is dashing towards its destination)
  4. Determine Point C, move Point B to C.
  5. Repeat creation of points and moving the sphere to them for x cycles.

One way I thought about doing this was to populate a given canvas with x points, and then to just select one out of the list of points randomly, and repeat that selection for x cycles. I realize that using Anemone is probably what I need, but I am unsure how to set up the loop to change the trajectory of the sphere after each consecutive move so I can animate the whole sequence along the path.

Maybe the simplest way is to just populate a geometry with x-amount of points, randomly shuffle the order of the points, draw a polyline connecting the points per this adjusted order, and then use this as the base path for the animation.

How do I create pauses between each move to make the animation feel snappy? Maybe it’s with the graph mapper that I achieve the varying accelaration, and then by adding a couple of extra 0’s at the beginning and 1’s at the end of the range for each path segment to have the point pause a bit before moving on. I’ve included what I came up with in the definition, although not sure how to apply this.

But then how do I get a point to move along this path? I’m a bit lost, would appreciate some help!

point animation.gh (11.1 KB)

Move sphere along random path animation, variable accelaration.gh (26.4 KB)

Honeycam 2023-07-02 11-16-44

Adjust Speed of One Loop:
I try to use Anemone to do the whole thing, but I could not find a way to make Anemone loop wait until the logic in one loop reaches a certain value(point).

Is there a way I can hold one loop(adjust the speed of one loop) until one animation finished?

1 Like

Data Dam has a delay that you can set. I guess it should work if you use it as the last component before looping ? But the delay will be constant.

move sphere V1 DataDam Added.gh (26.7 KB)

Thank you for letting me know!
I added Data Dam and deleted a plugin component(Curve Preview) in it.