Wireframes and BTS
Path segments
One of the trickiest parts of the animation was how to get these lines to flow around the letters, the initial idea was to have it working all in one beautiful dynamic simulation. This turned out to be really fucking hard / maybe impossible.
So I eventually decided on cheating this look, by splitting the animation into 2 sections, one for the simulation of lines flowing around the outside of the letters and the other for the key framed (not simulated) forms of the letters.
The forms were done with a simple sweep nurbs along the letter forms with a shader effector for the wavy effect and key framing the start and end points.
Simulation
Making the simulation was not easy and there was a tonne of development in testing out methods. I settled on using c4d fields which are great, easy to run and quick to set up, however due to the nature of simulations, they can be a massive pain to do exactly what you want. Lots of balancing of sliders, nudging elements and clicking that random seed button to get them to flow around the letters as I wanted. Maybe x-particles would have been a better way to go.
So these are all simulated particles from c4d emitters and tracers with their movements driven by field objects. Although they can be a pain, I am loving field objects at the moment, they are generally very art directable and fairly easy to run on my machine. There’s a couple different types of noise in the simulation to give that wavey effect I wanted, combined with some other objects used to push the particles where I wanted.
Comet trails
I needed the trails to dynamically follow the path the comet took. I could have implemented a setup that would have essentially been straight lines with a noise effecting their wiggle, however this would have looked very rigid and not have followed the curving path the comet took.
After a lot of research and development, I decided to use 3 tracers that each follow a position on the comet, this meant I could add sweeps onto the trails with their length controlled from the tracer. Doing it in this way also meant that as well as following the comet, I could oscillate the position of the trails using a plain effector to get that flowing look. Inside the plain effectors there is step field in the falloff with an animated sin wave.
So to put it simply, there are three lines that follow the comet’s position, each with an effect that gives them this wavey look.
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