seeking technique to mimic a pin-art or impression effect within a videowall
by danwick
on
Mar 6, 2007 at 6:48:21 pm
Do you remember the toy from the past that is a bunch of metal pins held together between a frame? You could press an object against it and make an impression in the pins? It was kind of an executive toy from the 80s. Does this ring any bells? Maybe you kids are too young!
My goal is to have a wall of video, where individual screens come forward and move back to make "impressions" and form shapes. So many streams of video are essentially the "pins" of the toy.
Any tips for a plugin that can help me achieve such a concept?
Re: seeking technique to mimic a pin-art or impression effect within a videowall by Dave LaRonde on Mar 6, 2007 at 7:33:27 pm
[danwick]"Do you remember the toy from the past that is a bunch of metal pins held together between a frame? You could press an object against it and make an impression in the pins?
...Any tips for a plugin that can help me achieve such a concept?"
Oh, I remember it all right, but if you try to make one in AE, you're going to drive yourself nuts.
My tip for a plugin is this: "3D Application".
Think Maya. Think C4D. Think anything but AE.
Re: seeking technique to mimic a pin-art or impression effect within a videowall by bear on Mar 6, 2007 at 9:49:34 pm
I agree with the previous posts that a 3d app should be the first choice, barring that, maybe post in the expressions forum and see if one could be written to place a layer in z space based upon another reference layer's luminance. think of a matrix of layers of pin heads, and this expression positions them in z based up a target image. That could be cool...
Re: seeking technique to mimic a pin-art or impression effect within a videowall by Chris Zwar on Mar 6, 2007 at 10:58:00 pm
You have just described card-dance, no expressions needed ;-)
It is the most obvious way of reproducing the effect, but as the pins will be 2D (you could use CC ball-action to generate the source image for you) you won't get the same feel as a true 3D app with 3D pins.
You could possibly try something with particle playground, using a greyscale control as an ephemeral map, but it would have work on scale rather than true Z-space, so card-dance is more suited to what you want.
I think that Ayato's website shows some of the stuff you can do with card-dance, but he was using text rather than pins.
