Echo / delay effect for geometry?

How-To
1

Hey all;

I’m trying to make a simple echo effect. Not with anything in particular, just exploring. So, say I have a beat generator connected to the visibility of a sphere, so it flashes on / off repeatedly… Could there be multiple copies of the sphere, each delayed cumulatively by a certain time, so that each copy flashes on but is delayed?

Obviously, could do it by just the delay modifier and connected to a copy of the geometry, but if I was doing anything complicated, I’d have to copy the entire network of the geometry multiple times…

Any ideas?

2

Hey There,

Yeh I’ve wanted this for a while with geometry too. I’ll add a bump to the feature request.

The only alternative I can offer is to use Fields and the 3D Object Emitter, with a math modifier set to emit periodically at the rate you want. Getting high accuracy could be expensive GPU wise, but its the closest you can get to this effect.

Thanks,

Ryan

3

Nice one, thanks!

That’s also a good suggestion to play around with, it’s not exactly right, but, you know, I like fields…

I think it sort of plays into other things I’m trying to get my head around (ie Way to trigger clips via midi?). I’m looking at notch as a live visuals generator, specifically that can react live to music, and bringing in footage, Houdini stuff, all the things. So recreating things like delay, and triggering animations and clips using external controllers / midi / osc is quite important, and I imagine it might be for other users. I think there are ways around it, but there’s not an easy workflow for “trigger clip from start when I hit this note”, or “delay effect”.

I imagine it’s probably really difficult to implement though, I’m not moaning…

Thanks anyway
Dave