Just a lil Animation

 Howdy peeps, 

this week for our animation assignment, I started off super simple by just lofting a polygon arch. I figured this was a good place to start as I'd never used a few of the commands in grasshopper that this assignment called for. This took me maybe only a few minutes and gave me a lot of confidence to pursue the actual assignment for the week. 

It was simple, it gave me a feel for the tools, and taught me a little bit about assigning materials in the Custom Preview slot. 

From here, I decided to continue on with the idea of an expanding arch. I thought the best way to highlight the use of the tools was to generate a rainbow that expanded in all dimensions. The way I wanted to go about this was to have multiple sweeps along two divided lines. What became really challenging though, was getting the shapes to properly sweep along the length of the arch. They would often want to condense into one point, or spin along the sweep. I figured using sweep2 instead of sweep1 would likely solve this issue, but when I went about generating the rails for this, the middle points in the arch were never placed right. I was using sets of circle CRNs, and making the normal in the correct direction, but rhino was placing the end and mid points at 90 degrees off of where they would need to be to make good sweep rails. as a result the program wouldn't even generate anything, other than a error message. I was overjoyed to find a simple rotation tool in grasshopper that I hadn't used before, and it worked like a charm. immediately after plugging it in, the circles snapped to the correct orientation, giving proper sweep rails to sweep2, and generating some nice circular arches for the overall image.

To add colour, I decided the simplest thing I could do(and the only tool I currently understood) was dispatch. once I had some good geometry, I just plugged it into dispatch about 6 or seven times, until I could see that the command had properly divided the arches into their own slots. From here it was as simple as giving each one of these outputs their own custom preview, and assigning a material that gave the overall image the right colour. The only problem with this was that when I eventually went back to the sliders to change the number and size of the resulting rainbow, the colours did not necessarily stay in the correct order. I'm unsure how to fix this, but I think all in all, the design came out pretty good. Looking forward to the next!