Randomize duplicate animations?

[djembeplay]

Ok, here's another one...

I like to duplicate things often. Hmm... I'm going to ask this question using an example.

Let's say I've finished animating a blooming flower. Now I want to duplicate it a few times. I don't want every flower to bloom and sway in the wind all at the EXACT same time... I want to offset the animation keys a bit on each one to give it more of a random / entropy feel.

Now, yes, I could go into each separate element of the flower and manually slide the key-frames around a bit, but after doing this a couple hundred times... I'm beginning to wonder if there is some sort of a key-frame randomizer that could make this process much quicker / simpler.

I looked around a bit through the help menu and looked through all the options in the time-line editor window... but didn't see anything to this effect.

Does anyone know of such wizardry?

[oneinfiniteloop]

What app are you using?

[djembeplay]

Oh, sorry... that would probobly be helpful to know, huh? :)

Cinema4D

[oneinfiniteloop]

If you have the Mograph module you can clone the flower then use the time offset in a step effector to offset the time. I think if you randomize the distribution of the flowers you should be able to mix it up a bit. Here's the link to a tutorial (http://www.hypa.tv/tims/animoffset/animoffset.html).

As a side note, XSi has a pretty cool Point Caching tool that allows you to duplicate animations and offset them very easily. If you check out the link in this thread (http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthread.php?t=158070) you can see it action in the second video.

[djembeplay]

Hmm... no go. My animation consists of multiple deformer animations, PLA animations, and parameter animations... all on multiple objects, some being nurbs objects, others being polygon objects.

Maybe I'm missing something, but it looks like the step effector only affects rotation, scale, and position... so it's designed for many simple geometric objects. When I tried to use it with my flower, everything became disconnected and out of sync.

So... idk what to do. I mean, I guess it's not a huge deal to go in an manually slide my keyframes around. I'm just thinking... wow, what if I have a few hundred flowers, for example... would I be putting hours of frivolous work into offsetting animations when I could do the same thing with a few parameter adjustments...

[oneinfiniteloop]

You must have missed that part in the tutorial, but you don't use it for transformations. You have to uncheck position, scale and rotation in the Parameters, that will stop your "disconnected" problem. You then use the Time Offset to offset your animations.

[djembeplay]

Hmm, nope... just tried it again. It just doesn't play well for some reason... I have align to spline tags everywhere, but the individual elements of the flower are still disconnecting.

Eh, well, thanks for the help anyhow.

[oneinfiniteloop]

Maybe you can post a scene file, might be easier than explaining how everything is set up.

[Anhar Miah]

I would probably go with (depending on camera movement) with a 2.5D solution:

Create on high definition animation, then use this animation as a sprite and clone this "billboard" as many times as you like;

Another route would be to look into particles, they are not just for breaking things ;)

Anhar

[djembeplay]

Surely. Here's a link to the project file-

http://www.filedropper.com/largeflower

That's a good idea Anhar. My only hesitance with that is I will lost accurate shadow mapping from neighboring objects in the final scene. Also, my camera movement would be limited if I didn't want to reveal that the object was on a 2-dimensional plane.

Oh, and as for particles... I don't know enough about them to understand how I could use them for this purpose. I mean, I have used emitters with forces... but haven't dipped into thinking particles yet.