snowfall effect

[bobschm]

New to Superstar and need a litte help.

 

I have 8 vertical CCPs and would like to generate snowfall. This is what I envision: multiple white dots (snowflakes) descending at various rates being replaced by more dots from the top in a pseudo-continuous loop animation.

 

I think I can probably live with different descent rates per string, rather than different descent rates per dot (Is that even possible in Superstar without hundreds of images?)

 

I built a group of random dots on one string and animated it down slowly over 10 seconds. By copy /paste and overlapping on an offset, I created about two minutes of snow on one string. Whew!

 

Eight strings is going to get tedious. If I just copy/paste to the other strings, the snow will fall as one sychronized wall. Is there a better way I'm missing?

[MikeyRo]

You might try copying the sequence at different starting times for each string, Varying the distance for each subsequent string, but not always making the next string start further in the time line, or that would look more like a chase.

So maybe, start string 2 2 seconds into the timeline, #3 something like .25 secs, #4 1.5 secs, etc.

Sounds to me like that might give you some randomness into the sequence.

[BrianBruderer]

The easiest way to do falling snow is with morphs. Do the following:

 

1) Click on the Tools menu and select Morphs

2) Set the Red, Green, and Blue controls to 100% to get white

3) Leave State 1 Head Length at 1, also leave State 2 Head Length at 1

4) In the "Tail" section, set Time Length to 0

The above settings will allow you to make morphs that consist of one white dot.

5) Use left mouse click to mark the start of the morph, use right mouse click to mark the end of the morph

 

As you mentioned, you will get the best effect if the dots travel at speeds that are a bit different from each other.

Add at least 16 morphs starting at various times on the 8 CCRs. After you get snow falling for a second or so, you can use copy/paste to past as many groups as you want to get the snow to fall as long as you want.

 

Also, there is a clipboard file named "SnowFalling.scb" that you can look at.

1) Click on the Edit menu and select "Load/Save Clipboard"

2) In the list of clipboard files select "SnowFalling.scb"

3) Click on the "Load Clipboard from File" button

4) Click on the "Paste" button and the effects will paste onto the time layers

 

Unfortunately, the clipboard "SnowFalling.scb" is for horizontal ribbons, so it is falling in the wrong direction for you. But you can look at it to see how it is done.

[MikeyRo]

Would Bobos clipboard flipper fix that so it was falling the correct way?

[ItsMeBobO]

Sorry  no it wont.    CBF will make a mirror on the horizontal or vertical.   It can not rotate.    

 

And it only works for SE clipboards.

Edited March 11, 2013 by ItsMeBobO

[BrianBruderer]

I don't expect Bobos clipboard flipper would work, he is flipping the clipboard for the Sequence Editor. The clipboard for SuperStar is different.

[bobschm]

Oh my Gosh. Morphs. That was so easy! Thank you Brian. 

 

Just saved a beautiful 10 second snowfall over eight strings that I can paste again and again. I created one full length "snowflake" on each string. By varying the length of the morphs, each string got a single snowflake falling all the way from top to bottom, but at different speeds on each string. I pasted that over and over at varying start times to achieve more random snowflakes. I'm going back in to tweak individual flake's speed. I should be able to easily get a flake to chase down the preceeding flake on the same string, which is exactly the random appearance I wanted.

 

Love this forum!