Rendering Animation without Slider?

Hi all!

I've been trying to export a model that can be rendered in Rhino as an animation, or at least just an animation straight from Grasshopper itself. I've looked around and it seems most answers link to animating a slider, unfortunately this may not be appropriate for my purposes.

I'm animating a structure based on input from an Android Device using the light meter, so the Grasshopper model responds in real time to changes in light levels. Obviously this isn't using a slider so I can't just right click and animate frames, I need some way of reproducing the animation for a renderer.

I've tried using the Recorder component which does record the data picked up from the sensor but I'm a bit lost at what to do with the recorded information if I'm honest.

If it's nigh-on impossible to achieve this then I guess I can make do with animating from a slider as a stand in!

Cheers,

Jon

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on January 16, 2014 at 11:43am

If you're looking to record a real-time process, why not just record directly off the screen? I use CamStudio for this.

David Rutten

david@mcneel.com

Permalink Reply by Jonathan Jones on January 16, 2014 at 1:06pm

I wanted to animate it but in a rendered animation, with materials and lighting, not just directly from the preview geometry. I've made a video with a screen recorder already but as part of the process I wanted something a little more polished at the end if this is at all possible?

I have just managed to utilise the recorder component and slider to make individual animations of the 4 viewports using information gathered from the device, but now I'm hoping there's a way I can use this recorded information to output rendered keyframes?

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on January 16, 2014 at 1:22pm

You can use (one or more) recorders to store this data and then use a slider combined with List Item to play it back while animating. If your data was recorded at a steady frequency that'll work as this approach will not remember the time between recordings.

David Rutten

david@mcneel.com

Permalink Reply by Jonathan Jones on January 16, 2014 at 1:30pm

That's what I've currently got to work, but that still just outputs the preview geometry from Grasshopper. What I'm looking for is a way to take this same animation but render it with lighting and shadows, in Rhino or another compatible package.

I read somewhere that there may be a script for baking each iteration or frame in the animation separately and rendering each part separately? I couldn't find a definitive answer on this topic though and it sounded like a bit of a convoluted solution.

Permalink Reply by Hannes Löschke on January 16, 2014 at 1:58pm

For a scene to render from Rhino with whatever renderer you choose requires a set of valid Rhino objects with textures and/or materials applied. So you need to bake each frame geometry anyway, start the render and destroy the baked data again. Repeat for next frame.

Creating an "animation timeline" doesn't generally make sense for renderers. Sometimes it makes sense to create one geometry file and only generate a lot of camera positions. Some advanced renderers use the changes between two frames to calculate motion blur. Other that that, it's always rendering frame by frame.

Default Grasshopper + some custom scripting will get you quite a way if you are happy with basic materials. There are several components around that allow for baking with materials.

Scarab will give you a bit more than Rhino materials if you have Maxwell (but I wouldn't use Maxwell to render animations). If you have a VRay license and a bit of patience, you can wait for Scarab.VRay probably coming up in a month or two. I am also working on an animation subset but that is still some time in the future.

Permalink Reply by Jonathan Jones on January 16, 2014 at 3:00pm

Thanks, that clears it up a lot, guess it's not going to be as easy as I thought to do this!

Cheers again to both of you

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