IsoPoly Tribute / Blender Animation Nodes Test
isopoly, isometric, low-poly, animated gif, motion graphics, blender, cycles, pyramids, triangles, spheres, glass, animation nodes
Posted in Motion || Posted on 2015-04-15 20:15:36
Higher quality versions: Ello | G+ | 2x@Dribbble | Imgur(?!?)
I have really been enjoying the animated GIF works of designer friend isopoly recently. As I studied his animations, I wondered how I could create something of my own that has so many moving parts. The mere concept of managing a scene with so many components was daunting to me. So in order to handle this level of complexity, I was practicing up on my skills in Python to accomplish such a task - but then I came across a review for the Blender Animation Nodes addon over the weekend. What’s this? No need to navigate the complex and sometimes obscure hierarchy of Blender’s Python API? Interactive and real-time feedback on a continually animating scene when I change values in a node network? No more complex and awkward driver setup where it’s hard just to navigate between individual animated properties? YES PLEASE!
Review:
http://www.blendernation.com/2015/03/17/review-animation-nodes-addon/
Addon:
https://github.com/JacquesLucke/animation-nodes
The badass who designed the system, Jacques Lucke, was making my dream of node based object instancing and animation control possible with this addon. It was a little bit unstable and behaved a little bit strangely in a few ways I could not have expected until after I had wrapped my mind around its implementation of the object list looping concept - but in just a single evening of focus, I was able to learn the tool well enough to produce this fun little system of objects. I would highly recommend this plugin to anyone who already loves node based workflows and knows a little bit of trigonometry. Just make sure to save your work frequently while incrementing your blend file’s version number, and learn how to use Blender’s “Recover Auto Save” feature. ;)
I hope that by exposing this addon to more users, we’ll increase the likelihood of getting this addon, or something very similar to it, developed to a point of stability, bundled with the software and enabled by default. This kind of power should be at everyone’s fingertips.
You can see an overview of the node setup that I created this scene with at the Imgur gallery here.