KODA

Today I worked on an animated “throbber” icon for Qball and the GMPC project. You’ll see it turning up in the SVN Just a fun little Inkscape/Blender project. Sure, there are hundreds out there, but how could I resist the chance to try doing it myself? After recalling reading Jimmac’s write-up of his creation of a throbber in Blender, I set out to create my own in Blender. The method I ended up using actually was much heavier on Inkscape than Blender, which instead became more of a raw animating and compositing tool in the end.

Ta-da:
Just rotation:
With In/Out animation:

The solution I came up quite simply used a single plane with two textures: an Inkscaped shape mask and a Blender conical gradient. Blender is pretty versatile when it comes to mapping, so I simply made the gradient align with the object space, and the shape with the viewing window area. That way, I could just let the camera roll and the coloring rolled with it.

An interesting but unanticipated effect from this texture mapping effect was that somehow, the lighter circles were appearing smaller even though I had nothing that would have made this happening. It turns out that my 22×22 shape mask was so small that I believe the antialiasing/alpha channel of the texture was enough to shave off of the size of the circles when in the light state.

The real bling came in with the in and out animations I added. It started as poking around with the Blender animation system, and ended up as part of the finished project. How sweet would it be if throbbers smoothly moved in and out, like high quality animated parts of a ui? Hopefully eventually Qball will implement this in the GMPC interface.

After stumbling around in the GIMP trying to figure out how everyone made those damn frame montage things. Jimmac’s Image Magick commands at the bottom of his post proved invaluable for putting together the tiled version of the animation Qball wanted. Gotta remember that command-line mojo!