Looping animation: Another small and playful one as a GIF…

I like the unstable look given by the flickering and the “2D or 3D?” impression.

It’s very simple, I just deformed a geometry with a moving 3D noise field, the only other animated parameter being the deformation scale:

I started with a basic solid, a buckyball (combination of hexagons and pentagons, the name comes from Buckminster Fuller, that could be another subject for a talk on geodesic structures…), then mapped the vertexes positions to a noise field, moving across 1 axis with a 50 frames period (so each 50 frames the field is in the same exact position).

The same scaling is then multiplied by an animated value going from 0 to 9 across 24 frames at the start, the opposite at the end of the animation (149 frames total), so it will smooth out and make the animation looping. Animations are interpolated for smoother transitions.

I used a black and white not interpolated ramp, mapped to the surface normal angle, as shader color and opacity. It’s a simple black ramp, (0) getting totally white (1) at around 95%.

If you like my works you can help me create more through my Patreon page!