You'll Want This Clock Made of 96 Clocks in Blender on Your Wall
Mohamed Fayed showed a virtual version of A million Times 96.
If you haven't heard of the ClockClock or A million Times collections by Humans since 1982, you might want to check them out after you see Mohamed Fayed's Blender version of A million Times 96, a mesmerizing clock made of 96 analog clocks.
The hands move smoothly to form the time in big numbers – all thanks to Geometry Nodes and Fayed's insane talent.
"It was hard to achieve this effect because I wanted to replicate the angle of the clock hands to match exactly with the angle of the numbers above it. I hope to make it fully procedural in the future, but I’m pleased with what I’ve created so far, even though achieving proceduralism is a bit challenging for me," he said.
For this project, Fayed wanted to create a procedural method to make the clock hands rotate in line with the angles of the numbers. He first thought to "save the rotation for each clock according to each number," but it seemed too complicated.
Then, he came up with a method to define two extra points along with the original one. "These additional points can drive the X or Y axis. This is what I want to achieve, but I haven’t been able to do it yet."
So finally, Fayed used Boolean operations and created a fake circle around the point to detect overlapping points. He used a method from the Edges of Vertices node, which gives you the points connected along the same edges. "To apply this to the clock points, you need to sample the nearest index using the sample index node and the sample nearest index method."
After, he adjusted the rotation based on a proximity mask, as he wanted to rotate the remaining points back to their initial rotation or rest state, with the hands overlapping at specific angles.
"Unfortunately, this method isn’t perfect as it can slightly distort the rotation, making it difficult to switch to another letter. Also, I need to ensure that the number object has vertices close to each point on the grid for sampling purposes."
There were many ideas that didn't work, Fayed admitted, but the final result shows that it's not always easy, but keep trying, and you'll get where you want eventually.
Fayed has a lot of great ideas, like this lawn mower setup made in Blender and this cool printing effect, which you can find on Reddit and Instagram.
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