Magic Music Visuals

They say an image is worth thousands of words : Right click on image and click "Show picture" for better view

There is an exemplar in the FFGL world provided free from Hive8 - Horizontal Clone There is also the Array effect already in MMV though this has only translation for its clones.

Another way to do this is to have cascading globals which use previous globals then add to them - you can build up some nice linked animation this way. I don't have time now but I'll try to do a demo later.

Instead of having a load of translations, rotations and scalings in a new module I think it would be nicer to have a module that collected transforms (and perhaps other things) back up the chain, then repeated those. This module would only have a '#Copies' parameter and perhaps a parameter to limit the distance back up the chain. So, for example, there would be (up to 3) transformations for the initial position and another set of transforms for the first clone.

Since it isn't possible (yet!) to apply globals as modifier parameters I've set the global position offsets to the same midi control to make it easier to change in realtime.

Yup I've thought of something like this. I think a Repeater module would work actually. The only problem would be the order of operations (do you scale and then translate, or translate and then scale?), but I think I could solve it by having a drop-down box that lets you choose the order.

Eric wrote:Yup I've thought of something like this. I think a Repeater module would work actually. The only problem would be the order of operations (do you scale and then translate, or translate and then scale?), but I think I could solve it by having a drop-down box that lets you choose the order.

Instead of a drop-down, what about using 9 inputs ordered: ROTATE XYZ > TRANSLATE XYZ > ROTATE XYZ.

Having two sets of rotations gives you more creative freedom, including the option to specify order by having one set of rotation values at 0.

What about Scale though? When you have all three types of transformations, there needs to be a way to select the order.

Eric wrote:What about Scale though? When you have all three types of transformations, there needs to be a way to select the order.

Riiight. My bad.

Out of curiosity, would the drop down visually reorder the inputs in the list, or just how they are interpreted?

A "module that collected transforms back up the chain" could preserve transform order.

Sadler wrote:A "module that collected transforms back up the chain" could preserve transform order.

Clever idea.

Out of curiosity, would the drop down visually reorder the inputs in the list, or just how they are interpreted?

Just how they are interpreted .

A "module that collected transforms back up the chain" could preserve transform order.

The difficulty in this case would be not just to repeat the transforms but to increment their parameters.

Eric wrote:Yup I've thought of something like this. I think a Repeater module would work actually. The only problem would be the order of operations (do you scale and then translate, or translate and then scale?), but I think I could solve it by having a drop-down box that lets you choose the order.

I thought the same after posting it ! Very clever idea !

+1 for the repeater!

For midi controls it could be useful to have a note repeater too in the module. Say you start from not 36 and increment the note number by 1 (or more)
This way building an animated keyboard woud be a piece of cake.

Yeah, I've been thinking about how to make it easier to do that kind of thing. It's a bit tricky, but I'll see what I can come up with.

One thing is a selection box should be available for "Prevent object rotation" Or something like that. Sometimes picture equals 100 words :

Without option :
With Option :