Anemone
The goal of this project was to recreate “Anemone,” a kinetic sculpture by Reuben Margolin.
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In the description of his project on his website, he mentions that there are specifically 48 of each of the upper pink sticks, of the lower blue bars, and of the strings that attach them. I made sure to incorporate 48 of each respective element into my recreation of his piece.
Comparison
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Reference
CG Recreation
1. Blue Bars Wave
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To create this cohesive wave effect across multiple objects I followed a YouTube tutorial by Sergey Golubev (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLteUba9WZg). I used this method throughout my project and applied it to most—if not all—of my moving parts.
The first step was to edit a polygon tube in order to get a bar-like shape that looked like the reference. From there, I used a copystamp node to copy the object across 48 points on a grid. In the copystamp node, under the stamp tab I added a variable (var) with a value of “ PT*3.”
I then added a transform node immediately after my geometry node (before the copystamp) and in the Translate Y box I applied the sine function “(sin(($F) *$PI *9/12) *.007)”. After the transform node, I added a timeshift node and in the Frame parameter I applied the function “$FF - stamp("../copy1" ,var, 0)/.5”.
2. Wooden Helices
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In the actual kinetic sculpture, these are solid cylinders sculpted with a wave-like effect all the way around and were meant act the drivers of the entire mechanical animation. Unfortunately for me, I made the mistake of saving these for last, so I had to work a little backwards. I ended up modeling an individual groove of the reference by shrinking down and editing a tube. From there I used the same method I applied to the blue bars: copystamped to a grid, added a transform node with “(sin(($F) *$PI *9/12) *.007)” in X and Y translations, and added a timeshift node with “$FF - stamp("../copy1" ,var, 0)/.5” in the frame attribute. The result looked like a solid piece of geometry.
I merged in the thicker end pieces to reinforce the solid appearance of the object and added a transform node to get the overall cohesive rotation that “drives” the motion of the smaller blue bars.
3. Pink Sticks Wave
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For the top pink stick animation, I used the same method as I did for the Wooden Helices and the Blue Bar Wave, except I copystamped the objects to a circle resampled to have 48 points instead of a grid. One of the issues that came from this was that my objects were all facing the same direction when I wanted them to face towards the center of the circle respective to their individual point positions. I looked this up and the forums suggested using a polyframe node with the Tangent Name attribute set to N in order to use the tangents of each point as its normal. The result was exactly what I wanted.
In the transform node after my object, I applied the sine function “(sin(($F*3) * ($PI *3/60)) *.15) * 1.5” to the Skew X attribute. I still used the same “$FF - stamp("../copy1" ,var, 0)/.5” function in my timestamp node, but in my copystamp node, I changed the value of my variable to “$PT^2” to replicate the sort of offset wave motion the original sculpture has.