Grid of Numbers animation, with Mask Layer controlling the speed

[vj.hieros.gamos]

Hello, I'm on Mac, Big Sur.

I'm working for a dancing company, and for one of our shows, I want to do something since a very long time.

At a moment of the show, I have a (46x16) grid full of integer numbers. At the beginning, I wanted to make them appears with random opacity on each numbers, with all the (46x16=) 736 numbers all set on "0".

This is where it began to be complicated for me.

At this point, a dancer came to the left side and moving on stage. And what I want to do is making an animation (linear, i.e. 0-1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-0-1... or even better a random one) ONLY WHERE the dancer is. To be clear, at the beginning, there's still "O" everywhere excepting where the dancer is on stage, and he's making this numbers "rolling/changing".

So I'm started to think about a "luma mask controller"... A 2D sphere with a gradient inside (white in his center) who can control the speed of the animation, and wich I can control 2D position and size. Brighter luminosity makes quicker the animation. Black is like "pause", or freezing the last number.

I've you got an idea ? Or a path to help me ? Thank you so much...

Take care, everyone.

[Walter_heen]

Hello!

Best way to do this is to use the grid point generator layer with a sprite point rendererer.

Put a spritesheet inside your point renderer.
Define the rows and columns of the spritsheet inside the renderer:

(interpolation means the way the spritesheet selector will blend if it's between 2 differents sprites)

then, change the selector type of the sprite sheet. in your case, you may have to use a full selector.

Duplicate your spritesheet and change the selector of this second renderer to "sphere" or something else. and here we go.

An example composition here DamierRandom.compo (69.8 KB)