Adventures with variable stroke width

CreatureHouse Expression (CE), the software I use to create most of my works, features several neat functions that almost beg to be animated.

Variable stroke width is one of them and the “theory” behind it is pretty simple: CE offers the possibility to set the variable width curve for any individual stroke.

See here, where different width curves are applied to the same stroke:

This quite simple idea usefuly complements the main idea of CE — brush strokes (more on those in some later article). It helps to fine-tune and sculpt them into desired shapes. Consider the difference between this part of my picture:

… and the same area with identic brushes and strokes, with no change in layout, but with flattened width curves (ugh…):

Because the width curve can be easily and smoothly changed by manipulation of control points (red and white points), it leans itself well to use in animations. Bellow I made two examples of tweening back and forth between 2 curves — the number of frames between two states can be made arbitrarily large, here 16 frames will do the job:

Cool, huh? Unfortunately this kind of tweening cannot be done automaticaly inside the program itself (some time ago I actually made some experiments doing it manually frame by frame, but it is pretty error prone and exhausting approach). Luckily, I added a vwidth tween as a fuction of my CE manipuation script and thus it can be used together with motion tween, transparency tween, color tween (more of those in other articles) to create richer animations.

It is suited well for breathing, pulsating motions, as in the case of this pangolin from piece called Pagolin’s revenge*:

Sometimes I also use different technique of animation of variable width, which does not involve tweening between frames, but uses one starting frame and sends calculated increments of starting width profile (a pulse) along the length of the stroke. It work best on long strokes with visible bump in width … in which case it resembles travelling of a signal.

Illustration of principle (stroke with the width bulge signal moving along the length):

When done right, the travelling can go on in an endless loop, and whith combination of starting signals in different phases, rather complex behaviour can emerge, as in this picture:

Or in its current cool habitat in Matt Kane’s georgeus gallery on cryptovoxels https://www.cryptovoxels.com/play?coords=S@402W,425S

This is the first installment from series of vignettes on novel possibilities of long forgotten CreatureHouse Expression, other pieces of mosaic coming soon 🙂