COmplexity
Next, I began work on the complexity buzzword. I chose to recreate a digital trick I saw a few years ago on YouTube.
The trick was originally used to create a fake marble sorting machine using CGI. It is based on the principle of running a basic physics simulation on a number of digital marbles and letting them fall down through a "sorting machine" that is just an assortment of pegs. These marbles are then coloured at the last frame of the simulation when they have already fallen into their respective pockets. Thjis gives the illusion that they are ordering themselves as they fall.
I took this basic idea and altered it so that instead of ordering themselves by colour, the marbles in my simulation order themselves to form the word "complexity"
The first step is to generate an array of spheres in a grid in blender:
I also rotate the array slightly so that they fall slightly more randomly
Next we give each ball a rigid body with a small mass and simulate them falling into a container:
Lastly, we go to the last frame of the simulation and using our "complexity" image texture as the base colour of the material we project the UV coordinates of all the balls from the camera view that we are going to render from. I then offset the coordinates slightly to make the effect slightly imperfect as I think it sells the illusion more.
Now if we view the start of the simulation there appears to be a random assortment of dots on the marbles that as they fall into place will "sort" itself into the word.
