Motion Quick Tip - Radar

Hello, this was a great tutorial, thank you for creating it.

I'd like to play with some more advanced behaviors to take this to the next level, but I'm quickly getting stumped.

First, I wondered how hard it would be to make each blip light up as the radar sweep passed over it, rather than all at once. Since they're placed randomly by the replicator, each instance of the blip would need to know where the sweep was so it could adjust the phase parameter of its oscillator accordingly, right? (Is this a parameter I can 'publish'? Or is there some way to 'rig' this? Sorry, you can probably tell I'm very green because I don't understand the terminology yet.) Or, I was looking at the Sequence Replicator behavior and trying to figure out if, instead of the Oscillator, I could use it somehow to control opacity of each blip as the behavior affected the group - maybe in some way corresponding to the movement of the radar sweep going around?

Second, I wondered about using the Numbers generator, to randomize some of the parameters of the text we put below the underscore - i.e. to create random coordinates / velocities for the 'planes'? Could these be animated, perhaps even to correspond with movement of each blip onscreen? The really cool (or accurate?) thing to do would be to only update the blips in short, jerky bits, as if they were only 'scanned' once per rotation...

Or maybe also the File generator, to use a huge list of pre-generated identifiers to randomly fill in the top line above each underscore and make different 'flight numbers.' For those, I'd only want it to pick new ones if I hit the 'Generate random seed' button, not to animate changing flight number identifiers!

I have lots of ideas like this, so as I'm trying to learn the capabilities (and limitations) of the software, it is very helpful to get suggestions for next steps. Thanks!

2325_radarscanning.motn.zip

It's almost identical except for I didn't make the mask around the edge. I like it spilling off a bit.

An editor's work is never complete. It is only abandoned when time has been exhausted. - paraphrase from Leo da Vinci

Bad ass. I particularly liked the tip on the sawtooth oscillation parameter. Very helpful techniques all around. I just made mine and will drop it in the archives. Thanks a bunch for making this tutorial!

An editor's work is never complete. It is only abandoned when time has been exhausted. - paraphrase from Leo da Vinci