Motion Design with Cavalry: Creating a Data-Driven Binary Animation

1. Intro: Hello, and welcome back to another awesome cavalry class with me, Ken. In this class, I'm going to show you how to design this matrix inspired binary digits background inside cavalry, and we're going to do it from scratch. 2. Design a Binary Digit Dynamic Background in Cavalry: So here we are inside cavalry, and I want to create a brand new project. So I'm going to go to this drop down menu and say create. I'll go to my two D projects folder, and I'll create a folder called the matrix. And I'll choose that folder. If I say Control, we're going to open automatically the SNS sub folder inside the matrix folder we just created. We have a Scenes folder. So now we're working inside it. And the first thing I want to do is create a dark black background because let me just show you the reference project I created while preparing this class. As you can see, we have a dark black background, and then the text is glowing green. So that's what we want to see how to do. The first thing I want to do is create a black background. So I'll go here and type Background shape. Enter. It's gray by default. It's automatically selected. So I'll go to fill, click this and drag this to black. Hold down out and click T the text to to add a text at the middle of the world. Here we have text that says cavalry by default. Want to change that to zeros and ones. So how do we do that? Want to write this. I'm going to say utility string generator. Now it's going to generate strings, but I'm going to select the string generator here to change some aspects of what we're looking at. For example, padding here should be one. That just removes all those digits before, precision, zero, and what else? We want to say random number. But the minimum should be zero, and the maximum should be one. So it's going to be random numbers, but the minimum will always be zero, and the maximum will always be one. So actually, the settings we were setting before were for the default setting we had, which was value. So now we have to redo everything we just did. Padding here should be one. Maximum here should be one. And minimum zero. So we will always ever have zero or one. So now, with that, what I want to do is select the cavalry text, and I want to duplicate it. So now, as you can see, we're duplicating random numbers. We can switch from grid to linear to be a straight line. And one thing I like doing is when I duplicate a shape, I place the shape under the duplicator so that I'm able to collapse the duplicator and hide everything pertaining to the duplicator, which includes the shape that was duplicated. And the string generator also goes under here because it's applied to the text. So it's actually supposed to go to the text so that I'm able to collapse the text, and its string generator stays inside it. It's just for organizational purposes. So now that we have this ability to generate random ones and zeros, we can increase the size here to 1920 because my screen is 1920 by 1080, this is HD. So I know if I say 1920, it's going to occupy the full screen. And we can increase the count. So we're just going to generate random ones and zeros. We can also expand this, select the text shape to reduce the font size. Let's say 25. And now, while the text is still selected, I can give it a green colour. Like that. And let's go back and select the duplicator. Now, we switched to linear and we did not change from horizontal to vertical. So let's change to vertical. Click aside. Now we have a vertical matrix like strip of ones and zeros. So all we have to do now is duplicate this duplicator. So with the duplicator selected, I'm going to duplicate it. And by default, it comes as grid. We're going to change to linear once again, and we're going to expand the size as usual to 1920. And increase the number here. Leaving gaps like that because right, not too big of a gap. Let's increase the number here. We can always come back to play around with it. So this is two D, but we want it to be three D. So what we have to do is add a camera. Enter. And when you add a camera, for all the shapes in the scene to also work with a camera, you have to change them to 2.5 D. So now that we have 2.5 D, we can come and select this duplicator. We can duplicate it as well. But now this time it's Control D. We're not using a duplicator we just control ding it so that we're able to select this. And because it's 2.5 D and we have a camera, we have this position Z. We can push it backwards. So if I pull this backwards, now, the background is also supposed to move backwards. So let me select it. Push it backwards as well. But now it's shrinking in size because it's going further into the distance. So what we want to do is increase the scale. I'm going to hold on to increase both the X and Y. And now it's further back in the background, but occupying the full space. Now going back to this duplicator here, we can push it a little bit further back. Holding down control, you will move in smaller increments, pull towards the left. Let's give it maybe up to negative 50. Just like that. Now, let's create another one. Control D, select this, Control D. We have duplicator four. Let's give it positive 50. That's going to bring it further ahead of the original, this one. So now we have a nice matrix background, but what we want to do is give it that gradient. So what has this green color? It's the text. So expanding this text, going to the fill color. We want to change from the flat green color to a gradient shader. When we do that, the gradient is added. I'm going to drop it under the text so that I can expand the text and find its gradient here. And I'm going to double click this, give it a green color. And I will click this, give it a black color. But in the green zone. All right. So now, as you can see, if I zoom in, it's affecting each individual element in the duplicator. So what we want is screen space. Screenspace like that. And as you can see, it's moving from left to right. We want to rotate it in the 90 degrees. In fact, we want it as negative 90 because we want the dark side below. Now, I'll pull this dark stop dark gradient stop and pull this green gradient stop like that. Now, this side should be pure black or maybe slightly lighter. Taking a toll on my machine. I think that's a nice spot. But this is too sharp. Let's make it more gradual by spacing them out. I'll click anywhere here and hit F. To fill the screen with your scene. So now what we want to do is give it that glow. So I'm going to go to let's select this one of the duplicators. I'll select this and say filters glow. And it's going to be given a glow. I'll drop the glow inside that duplicator and select a glow. I'm going to go to glorid intensity. Let's try four. Enter. There we go. Not too much. You can play around with the other settings to make sure you get a nice glow. But essentially, that's how to create a beautiful green, glowing matrix background. And one more thing I just remembered, we did not animate the camera. You might be wondering, how do I animate the camera and move it towards the ones and zeros. So selecting the camera, make sure this handle is at the very beginning. This handle, and let's add a keyframe in the Z axis. So I'll add a keyframe right there at the beginning, and let's move it to the very end. And in the Z axis, by this time, we want to have moved in. Let's say, up to that point. So the keyframe will be added automatically. And now if I play now my PC is a bit laggy. Of course, there are many more ways creative ways to animate these binary numbers. You can also animate them changing 1-0 randomly all over, but that would make this class too long. Those are things you're going to learn how to do in future lessons. Until next time, stay creative, and I'll talk to you soon.