Doodads

Geometry Nodes cookbook?

Yeah, this isn't really a "cookbook" but more of, again, notes on doing certain effects.

Autofitting text

Thanks to pjfrix for the tip!

There are two parts to this node setup.

1. Fine tuning spacing

This first part scales down the individual characters, changing their effective spacing.

The gizmo being set up here points in the local Y axis.

2. Autoscale text to a fixed boundary

This second part actually performs the scaling. It essentially takes the text's bounding box, replaces the X range with one of our choosing (which can be controlled with a gizmo), and then stretches/squishes the text geometry so that it fits with our custom bounding box.

What the resulting geometry is joined with is its own bounding box, so we can see it in the viewport. The Switch node lets us enable or disable it.

The gizmo being set up here points in the local X axis.

Trails!

Here's something I've recently used, specifically in my VCL logo remake. The trail effect that seems to be popular in stuff from the 60s through the 80s. Thanks to Studio S for the tip!

The idea here is:

1. Left side: Move, etc. the object that's being operated on (i.e. the one with the Geometry Nodes modifier) with another object, say, an empty

2. Right side: Add a trail effect using a feedback loop provided by the Simulation zone.

In the WPIX remake I previously used a repeat zone. From what I can gather, here are the differences:

It does make sense then why we can use a simulation zone for this type of effect, the point is leaving a trail of whatever previous state the geometry was in alongside the new one. Side note, this seems to also work if the object has shape keys:

However, this node setup presents some problems. If you play the animation back, the simulation zone will keep going and adding objects. If the original object is quite complex, like, say, the map of the world, it adds up quickly.

To fix this problem, we can delete the trails that we don't want to render anymore.

1. So we want to delete a portion of the generated geometry. But what kinds of geometry do we want to delete?

2. Every instance has its own index. We can select instances of a certain index using the Compare node.

3. We specify that we want to delete instances with indices greater than X, where X is the maximum trails we want to keep per frame.

4. This, in effect, says "delete trails older than X frames". In the above screenshot, "get rid of trails that are 11 frames old"

But what if we want the trail to be between time A and B? Well we break the conditional down, and then use it as an input for the Switch node:

Okay, one last thing. If you want your trails to fade away smoothly. It's a little hard to see so you might want to open the image in a new tab or something.

1. We're adding a new attribute to the instances named "opacity" that will contain some number between 0 and 1, and it depends on the age of each trail. The newest one will have a value of 1.0, and the oldest close to 0.0.

   We build this attribute by getting the number of instances through a node called "Domain Size" (god I hate that name), dividing the instance's index by it and then subtracting it from 1.0.

2. The material that's assigned to the whole object can read this attribute, so we can use it as the mix factor of the material between transparent and a full emission. We can use a color ramp to control the fade here.

3. Here's how the attribute looks in the spreadsheet. Notice the value dropping with each index, because the higher indices indicate older trails.

Expanding curves

1. To accomplish this, the curve is resampled so that some attributes can be taken at any known point. The sample range is from 0.0–1.0, so take the vertex index and divide it by the "length" (or how many vertices there are), so with each index we have the value of its normal.

2. Then we take that normal vector and scale it, this scale is the expand parameter.

3. Finally we can apply this to every vertex in the curve to apply that effect.

Resources for making fonts!

Designing letters

Here's a graph that shows what letters you can "cannibalize" when you want to design some other letter. For example, for Y, you want to take elements from I and also V, which is why those two other nodes point to Y. Or what letters you can make from another letter. For example, v can be used to make y and w, which is why those two "come from" the v node.

The graph is interactive! You can hover over a letter or a number in the graph below to highlight what characters can be made from it, or how it can be created from other characters. The O H n o nodes has been highlighted in cyan as those letters are commonly how you start making a font.

Please note, that this is just ONE possible graph of deriving lots of characters from other characters. There are many ways to do this, of course depending on your specific designs and what you want to go for.

Spacing and kerning

• Robofont — Intro to Spacing

  A pretty good guide to spacing letters, regardless of font software. I reproduced the spacing relationship table here:

  	left	right
  lower/straight	n h m u l i j k b p r	n h m u l i j
  lower/round	o c e d q	o b p
  lower/angled	v w y x	v w y x k
  upper/straight	H E F L I B D P R M N K	H I J
  upper/round	O C G Q	O D Q
  upper/angled	V W Y A X	V W Y A X K

  
  
• Making Biorhyme — Spacing

  Though a bit broken, it's an interesting write-up. Includes Walter Tracy's method of determining letter spacing:

  
• Kern King

  By Leslie Cabarga. It's a weird text file. But it is specifically designed to troubleshoot kerning issues that might pop up in real world use.

• Minimum Kerning Pairs

  By Impallari Type.

• Font Testing Page

  Where those two text files above came from.

• Stephen Nixon's Spacing resource page

  Heaps more complete than this one, really.

And of course there's also Puz's type design crash course, which plunged me further down this artsy rabbit hole.

Audiovisual Identity Database

Yup. It's here. The stuff Astralite and I did is just the first 8 seconds of the thing, the rest of it is… things I personally want to get good at lmao. Think I should get the trivia stuff out of the way first:

• The whole thing was done in Blender, using two different versions: 2.79 for the actual animation, 4.4 for the final composite with the rays and stuff.

  The entire thing could have been done in one version or the other, but I used 2.79 because I thought Astra would want to do something with it, whereas 4.4 is really to make compositing go faster because it's a version where the compositor uses my GPU.

• The video wall map was made by Astralite. It was originally a full-size SVG. He also made the concept… and the music to go with it, which is NOT the one shown in the video. Hoping it will be heard in future videos though.

• The animation was generated using a Python script. It's worth noting that the actual script is maybe about 10% of the file—that being the configuration section at the top, and the thing-doer at the bottom—the middle majority is just the PNG parser library pasted in for convenience.

  This is probably the first time I had actually used Blender's Python capability for anything "hands-on". Previously I had tried to make a few extensions with it.

  The script originally used the Pillow library, which in regular Python is one of the major libraries used to manipulate pictures. I knew of this sick trick used to install libraries using Blender Python, and it actually worked on my end. But it's a bit too impractical to expect people to install things using unconventional methods. And besides, the WHOLE kitchen sink isn't needed—just the one that does the job, in this case parsing a PNG image. Specifically, Astra's video wall map squished down to a 54×29 pixel art image consisting of only black and white (where the individual videos will be placed).

• 64 videos were used in the 927 screens. You may have noticed a LOT of duplicates—it's because the videos are assigned randomly, independent of each other. I could have figured out how to ensure the recurrent videos don't appear like literally right next to each other, but that would have taken a bunch more math and it doesn't really matter anyway.

  Every one of those videos are 480×360 normalized to 60fps, because that's the frame rate the intro was originally rendered in.

• Rendering the raw animation took two hours in total, and a lot of memory. Most of the time and memory spent on loading all the video files, I find. If a lot more videos were used I would have probably run out of them, and this is in a 16 GB machine. Didn't even enable swap.

Next up, the process…

The finishing touches were done at the end of March (there probably shouldn't be a reason for me to be taking that long). Two master versions are made, one for just "AVID" (the one that would eventually be used) and the other for "The AVID Channel". Not only are they silent, but they also end early—it's just to save a bit of file size since the logo is just a still frame and a fade out at the end. I also made sure they fit within a 4:3 safe area as well, in case it would be cropped as what I had to do with The AVID Channel ident that shows up at the very beginning.

WPIX-TV (11 Alive) - 1982 logo remake

Before you point it out, yes I've noticed:

• The text trail at the bottom should move with the camera. Not a hard fix, that one, even with the camera still pretending that it's 2D
• The timing of the shine effect at the end could be a bit more accurate
• The final "3D" logo could be aligned better (particularly the lower left part of the "11")
• The original has a tiny part of the "11" drawn before it's supposed to, not even block's remake is anal about that so I've likewise "fixed" it

Embassy Home Ent. - 1986 logo remake

Some things of note:

• The outlined star flying in at 0:06 isn't actually flying in 3D space—it's actually parented to the camera. It “flies in” by scaling instead of actually moving towards the camera. As to how it's made to look like it's flying in behind the giant E, it's a mask that's enabled at the right moment. I really could not replicate in actual 3D how the fly-in looks in the original logo.

• The gold texture used for the giant E stays in place, which is good because it can be reconstructed pretty well: