Introduction:  This tutorial will walk you through using my Aurora_Attractor plugin to create the alien bug you see in the demo clip. I actually stumbled on a crude form of this guy completely by accident while I was testing the new 2D projection equations I had added. I then wanted to see what would happen if I extended the projection to all three axis's. Thus both the bug and a new set of 3D projections were formed. I have since found a whole bunch of alien-esque creatures lurking about in all of the different attractor types. I'll show you the basics of how to create the bug and then you'll have a basic understanding of how to hunt for your own creatures.

What this tutorial is not going to do is show you the how to fully rigging and animating the bug. I'll cover it briefly but its a straight forward process so I'll just stick to the important points so I can concentrate on showing you how to use the plugin in both Modeler and Layout. 

So lets get started. I'm going to assume you have already installed the plugin if not then go get it from here and follow the install instruction. 

1 - First open Modeler and launch the plugin. Under 'Type' select 'Icon'.

2 - Set 'Max Iterations' to some higher but not all that high number right now, so lets say 1500. Why? Well we want something fast and easily responsive. We'll come back at the end and crank the iterations up.

3 - No need to change Boundary settings since no points will be escaping to infinity with this particular attractor and the start should already set to the origin xyz=(0, 0, 0) so we will be happy.

4 - Leave the Icon parameters set to the defaults. If you want to make sure they are set to the default settings just hit the 'Reset Params' button.

5 - Set 'Drawing Method' to 'Point Polys' to create single point polys instead of just points. You can leave them as points but if you want to see the points in Layout especially if you want to rig and animate your bug then this is a great thing to do.

6 - At this point go ahead and hit the 'Draw' button to see what we have so far.

7 - OK, this sure does not look like the bug I promised. What you are seeing is the normal default Icon attractor which can be an extremely fun attractor to play with in its own unmodified state but we are after something much more then this so lets carry on.

8 - Switch to the Projections tab

9 - Click on the 'Projection' check box to turn Projections on.

10 - From the 'Type' dropdown list select 3D Nautilus.

11 - Go ahead and click the Draw button to see what we have done so far.

12 - Hey now that's looking a lot better, trust me it really is. However we only have half a bug so lets create the other half.

13 - Switch to the Symmetry tab.

14 - Click on the 'Mirror' check box to turn mirror symmetry on. Make sure you are set on the X-axis and the Axis Offset is set at 0.0.

15 - Hit Draw again. Well we are almost there, we have the basic shell and its now mirrored but it still is not doing what we should have expected because we did not mirror the projection the way we should have expected. So why is that. Well to understand this you need to know a little of the guts of the plugin. What's happening inside the plugin is we first completely calculate the base attractor, which in our case is the Icon attractor we first drew. Next the plugin looks to see what the calc order for further calculations should be. The default setting is to calculate symmetry transformations and then calculate projection transformations. So right now we calc the Icon, mirror it across the X-Axis and then send the mirrored modified data to the projection calculations. What we want is to use that projection data we created first and then mirror it. So we need to tell it to do the projection calcs and then the symmetry calcs.  Make sense? No? No matter its really a simple fix.

16 - Switch back to the Draw tab.

17 - Next to the 'Calc Order' click on Proj->Symm. This now tells the plugin we want to calc the base attractor then apply the projection transformations and finally mirror the projection.

18 - Hit the Draw button.

19 - There we go now we have our Alien Bug!     Well kinda, She really looks better when rigged with bones and then stretching some of the, shall we say appendages, out a bit. More on that later.

20 - Now's a great time to up the the 'Max Iterations'. You can set it to whatever level you want but I'd suggest setting it to something semi-low like 10,000.

21 - From here go ahead and save the Object. Now since the final object is saved and the plugin saves the current state of the settings so if you shut the plugin down and start it back up your previous state will still be there. However if you make any changes to the plugin settings you will loose your bug I suggest you save the attractor file.

22 - To save your settings switch to the Files tab

23 - Here you have a couple of choices of formats to save to. The first one is to 'Save Params'. This option lets you save ALL the settings you have made for this attractor including the draw, projection, and symmetry settings.

24 - The other option is to Save Chaoscope files. This option just saves the attractor type and the attractor parameters for use with Chaoscope which is another standalone Strange Attractor application.

25 - Given these options I thinks its pretty plain we should be saving all of this with the Save Params option. This will save your file as an ~.aps file anyplace you want.

26 - OK, now just a quick word on rigging this guy. Like I mentioned earlier he's just like any other character you would want to rig so all rigging methods, techniques and rules apply here. I was in a hurry so I just created a very quick and dirty skelegon setup in Modeler matching bones to what I imagined the bugs morphology to be and how I wanted him to work as an animated creature. I debated on going full ant like with six legs or stay with the alien bug concept with just four legs and two fore-arms like a praying mantis. In the end it was a coin toss and the four legs and two arms won out. I created a long neck to hold what little of the neckish point in place and added extra skelegons for the mandibles and horn like antennas. I also created a eight weight maps to make sure all parts stayed nice and crisp. The weight maps included the Back, Chest, FrontArms, FrontLegs, RearLegs, Neck, Head, and Tail.

That was pretty much all I did in Modeler. I then popped him into Layout and converted my skelegons to bones. I added a Simple IK/FK setup to the legs and arms with a couple controllers. I also added Item shapes to them as well as the mandibles and antennas for fast easy animation.

To create the full bug form I rotated the body down and then stretched the FrontLegs out and down till they touched the ground. I then stretched and bent the FrontArms into place. From there it was keyframe animating as normal. Like I said it was quick and dirty. Below are a couple images of the bugs simple rig setup.

27 - Well that covers about all I'm going to show and say about rigging and animating the bug, at least for this tutorial. What I want to do now is send the object into Layout (or open Layout and load the object.) I want to show you how I textured him with HV's.

28 - Open the HyperVoxels panel and double click on the 'Object Name' that contains your bug object. (Note, I'm going to be lazy here and show you the one I actually used in the demo clip since I already had it open to get the rigging screen grabs. So ignore all the other layers under 'Object Name'.)

29 - This is really a quick setup for using clip maps so texturing is a breeze. Set the 'Object Type' to 'Sprite'.

30 - Set 'Particle Size' to 60mm and 'Size Variation' to something substantial like 300% and make sure the 'Align To Path' is checked.

31 - Switch to the Shading tab. Ignore the 'Color' settings. We will be adding a clip map so it does not really matter what you do with the color, it won't be seen!

32 - What you do want to do is to set the 'Luminosity' to something high like 1000. Set 'Opacity' to 75% and 'Density' well leave it at 100%.

33 - Click on the 'T' texture button for the 'Luminosity'. Add a new 'Gradient' Layer type. Drop the 'Layer Opacity' down to 95%. Set the 'Input Parameter' to 'Local Density'. Set the start key at a 'Value' of 15%. Now add a second key and drag it down to the bottom and set it to 100%. When done hit 'Use Texture'.

34 - While still on the Shading tab click on the Clips sub-tab. First you need a funky little spark image to use. I have a whole library of different sparks and sparkely things. They are fast, fun and easy to make in Photoshop. Since you won't be seeing a huge amount of detail on it it does not matter to much on what the image looks like but heres the image I used.

35 - With that in mind and an image ready for you to use click on the 'Image Editor' or hit F6 and load your clip map image. Now back in the HV panel click on the 'Add Clip' drop down and select the image you loaded. Under 'Alpha' select 'Luminosity'. I added a little Rotation and set 'Frame Offset' to 'Particle Age'.

36 - Well in order to render your bug there's only one thing left you need to do other then the normal camera and light setups. You can go ahead and close the HV panel now. Making sure you have the Bug object selected open the properties panel for it and move to the 'Edges' tab. Change the 'Particle/Line Thickness' to 0.0 pixels. You want to do this so that when you render your object those point polys we created the bug with will not show up making the HV's look all funny like.

37 - Well other then doing you camera and light setup however you want to deal with that your ready to render your alien bug. 

Remember what I said earlier there's a whole bunch of these guys hiding in all kinds of different attractors. So what you want to do to find and create your own is to start hunting for funky attractors. The attractors alone will not create anything of creature like objects, well unless you want an energy cloud creature. So the next thing you want to do is, making sure you have the calc order set to Proj->Symm, find a decent projection and then most often use mirror symmetry to create it. I'll give you a hint to really get started. Use a decent Icon attractor. Use one of the '3D' projection modes and then click the 'Retain Projection' button on. Now start playing with some of the other projections in succession. What's happening here is that you are no longer going back to the base calc first but you are using the transformed data from the previous projection as the start point for the next transform. Don't forget that in Modeler you have to hit the 'Draw' button to see the update (not a bug but a design decision). If you want faster/easier hunting you can do the exact same thing in Layout only you'll get instant updates, the draw back is the response time is slower due to the fact that you are creating particles and points. If you want to set your creature up for rigging or endomorphs in Modeler just save the parameters to an '~.aps' file and load it in Modeler.

With that I bid you a good day and happy creature creating!

Please feel free to contact me with any question or comments: aurora@auroragrafx.com