Animatable DNA helix made of text ?

Hi,

I am new to Fusion and this forum. I bought Fusion Studio recently to make a highres image for a pull out flyer used during an exhibition. I can say it took time to undestand the concepts of Fusion but it was fun.

Even though being a noob and hobbyist, I now was asked by a friend if I can make something whose general design is based on a DNA helix idea.

She likes the main strands and the homologous base pairs (the connections between the main strands) be made of text. I am now thinking about how to achive the DNA desging and the text in a way, that I can animate it in 3d space. Great would be if I could even animate an unwind / wind effect of the whole structure.

Does somebody have a hint on how this could be solved in Fusion?

Hi Wolfgang.

This might get you started.

TextHelix.jpg (60.19 KiB) Viewed 5226 times

Enjoy.

Many thanks Toulouse,

I will learn from it when I am back home in the evening.

Appreciate your help.

You're welcome.

It's actually fun to work on this.

TextHelix2.jpg (42.55 KiB) Viewed 5194 times

Version 2 now even comes with an (un)winding feature
and a (pseudo)random GC / TA base pairing (FWIW...)

Ah well...
Once you start playing around...
Fusion is so friggin cool....

TextHelix4.jpg (36.79 KiB) Viewed 5185 times

Hi Toulouse,

those are great examples.
One question: Can you tell me what the Fuse.Time3D node is? When I open the comp (003 and 004) Fusiion says it is missing. I googled and had a look into the manual and learned that a Fuse is a kind of hand made code. Can I get this code from somewhere? Could not find it seaching the internet.

It's here:

http://www.steakunderwater.com/wesuckle ... ?f=6&t=131

Thanks Pieter!

I got this Fuse some time ago during a Fusion Training (which was quite cool)
from our Trainer.
Thought it was part of Fusion by now....

Here it is, just for reference...
It goes into
C:\Program Files\Blackmagic Design\Fusion\Fuses\Blackmagic\

Many thanks again guys,

sorry for the delay in my posts. I am a new user and my posts need to wait for approval by a moderator.

May I ask about the text edit field? I am confused about it being mirrored. If I open TextHelix04.comp and edit T_Main_1 the writing goes from right to left and the characters are mirrored. If I open a new comp and just put a Text3D it works as I would expect it. Am I doing something wrongly here?

No worries...

This is due to the settings in the Text+.
Open the "International Font Controls" Reveal in the Text-Tab
and set "Direction" to "Left to Right" (or "Automatic")

No....wait!

In this special case the Text+ StyledText is animated.
(It's generating the base-pairs)
When you type at the end of the already existing text,
Fusion updates the keyframe (and apparently the tool itself as well)
which makes the cursor jump to the left in the text-field.

Bug or feature?....

I think I got it. The text edit field really follows the state of the animation. Confusing for me, but maybe intended like that for advanced users.

May I ask about the switching of the cg and at characters?
I found that you set the different chars with keyframes 0 to 3.
Then later on they appear as connections (either AT or CG).
What I struggle to understand is the combination of Time3D and Duplicate.
Duplicate takes care that there are multiple instances of the connections with an x offset.
But how does it work that it creates either AT or CG but not a wild mixture of them
(TC, AG, GC, etc.). I am sure it has to with the Time3D but not sure how this works.
I see a value of 2.86... in it, but don't know what that means.

If you know a tutorial about that, even one I have to pay for, I would be happy.

No need to pay anything, it's actually quite simple...
I manually animated Text1 and Text2 so that they always end up with valid base-pairs.
Basically like so:

Frame 1 2 3 4
Text1 G A C T
Text2 A G T C

This was then fed into the Time3D.
The Time3D's time-value is modified with a Shake,
generating values between 1 and 4.
This leads to random (but valid) base-pairs.

The Duplicate3D then generates multiple copies with a frame-offset of 1.
And the final Time3D is there to 'freeze' the animation at frame 1.
Otherwise the base-pairs would continually shuffle through.

Just press play and view the first Merge3D, the Time3D, the Duplicate3D, and the last Time3D
one after another to see the individual effects...

Sorry for long time silence from my side. Daily job hit me with numerous deadlines.

But I am back to the DNA now. I think, I got the concept of the Time3D. But the shake in the Duplicate seems to be not the best solution for my purpose. I tried to show what I am after in the attached image. Instead of a random appearance of the strings I hope to get them in more controlled fashion. I think I could do that with a lot of individual Text3D nodes, but like the idea of doing it with keyframes. Unfortunately I couldn't find a way to tell Fusion to reuse the values of the keyframes to let the text repeat over the length of the DNA. It would be great to get a hint how this can be achieved.

And again many thanks for help.

DNA_Repeat-Text_001.png (278.18 KiB) Viewed 4907 times

Hey Wolfgang,
I would break it down like this..

T_main_1 ( animated Text node ) -----> Dulpicate3d node ( 8 copies / with time offset to 1 ) -----> Duplicate3d ( 3 copies / no time offset ) ----> Time3D set to 1 ---> then your merge and so on

You might have to adjust the number of text ( "Developer Operations" ) on both sides

Hope that helps

.Dunn

Hi.

This is actually quite simple....

Enjoy.

Hi.

This is actually quite simple....

Enjoy.

Clean setup, distilling it down as much as absolutely possible. Nice. I love simplifying stuff down as much as possible - it's an area where I really benefited from my lazyassness.

Argh,
it is that simple?
I think, I need to rearange my brain cells. I was trying to understand modifier -> calculations and other nodes etc. to solve this and of course totally failed. It seems to be difficult for me to understand how easy solutions in Fusion can be

Thanks for helping me to get a starting point with this helix. I will now investigate how to make it more "cool locking".