Metal Wave 1 (Romanowsky / WaveGrower Tribute)

This design was originally posted on my Tumblr on Feb 3rd of this year, but I went back and did a higher resolution render of the design so I could share it with the Dribbble community at 800x600. :)

This design was inspired heavily by these designs by @Romanowsky:

"Brass Interface":
https://www.behance.net/gallery/10583809/Brass-interface

"Equinox":
https://www.behance.net/gallery/11668171/Equinox-collection-by-MANEKIBOOK

This was also made possible by some scripting help and inspiration from @Frédéric Vayssouze-Faure:
http://wavegrower.tumblr.com/

So I thought I should finally take the time to start playing with Blender's Python API to aid in the creation of my more complex ideas for animated designs. Turns out, Python was a lot easier to get started with than I thought, and when pointed to the BPY module, IntelliJ IDEA's (http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/) context awareness made learning the both the language and interface a lot faster for me. The code to create and animate this design was seriously only about 25 lines of code. First, I manually created one group of objects - one diamond, one radial segment, and one spear, each arranged at different positions relative to the center. Then it took about 15 lines of code to create 96 instances of that group and assign drivers to them, and 10 lines of code to describe their motion in that driver. SO SIMPLE! SO HAWT!

I really want to thank WaveGrower for sharing some conversations with me about the process he uses to create his amazing work (http://wavegrower.tumblr.com/post/94048173870) - which, as it turns out, is mostly programatic. It was awesome to have the chance to share some scripts back and forth with him over email. That connection with another talented artist in the field of motion graphics was the pivot point in overcoming my hesitation to start moving in this creative direction. Thank you WaveGrower. :)