Motion Library

The primitives

Written as operations rather than as effects, because that is the form a node editor can consume. Every study above is a combination of these.

Projection

Real 3D positions flattened by an explicit camera. The source of every honest 2.5D read.

Layout morph

One set of geometry under several layouts, blended point-by-point. How a scene becomes another scene without being rebuilt.

Depth cue

Alpha, scale or weight standing in for lighting. Cheap, flat, and more legible than shading.

Scroll camera

Scroll drives a camera through one continuous scene instead of revealing stacked sections.

Glyph field

Text broken into individually addressable characters with a home and an away position.

Surface mark

A flat shape living on a curved surface, foreshortened along its own normal. Buys rotation from almost no geometry.

Spring

Damped follow. Nothing snaps, and stiffness/damping carry most of the perceived personality.

State machine

Named modes with their own laws AND their own look, so the state is readable before you test it.

Scheduler

Jittered periodic events. What makes a thing feel alive when nobody is interacting with it.

Z-crossing

Objects passing behind each other. The single cheapest cue that sells depth in a flat scene.

Antipodal pair

Two marks at +axis and -axis of a rotating axis. Continuous by construction, with no phase to wrap.

Trail

Motion history drawn as decaying echoes. Reads as speed without any blur pass.

Painter sort

Explicit far-to-near draw order. Replaces a depth buffer with one sort per frame.

Pointer gaze

Continuous, saturating response to pointer position rather than discrete hover states.

Curvature comb

Signed curvature drawn as hairs along the normal. Makes a discontinuity visible that no amount of staring at the curve will show.

Solve, not expose

Give the user the outcome they care about and solve for the parameter underneath. Turns a handle into a result.

Subdivision

Recursive splitting with the endpoints held fixed. Detail on demand, from de Casteljau to a coastline.

Angular sweep

Sort events by angle about a point and walk them once. Turns an occlusion question into a one-dimensional scan.

Accumulation

Average many exact solutions instead of blurring one. Penumbra, motion blur and antialiasing are the same move.

Mask memory

Persistent state kept in an alpha channel rather than in a data structure. No grid, no bookkeeping.

Shared seed

Key the randomness on identity rather than on draw order, so two independent consumers agree without talking.

Field classify

Ask each pixel which region owns it instead of constructing a boundary. Cheap to perturb, impossible to stroke.

Flow field

One continuous field that everything samples, so unrelated objects agree about the world for free.

Jointed chain

A body integrated joint by joint. Stiffness falling along its length is what makes a tip whip and a base hold.

Reference frame

Re-origin the same simulation. Most of what is confusing about a system is a frame problem, not a physics problem.

Symplectic step

Step so that a long-running simulation stays put. Energy is allowed to wander; it is not allowed to run away.

Symbol quantise

A continuous field read out through a fixed grid of discrete marks. The grid is the resolution; the alphabet decides whether it reads as a picture or as texture.

Solve one orbit

When an arrangement maps onto itself, the distinct cases are its orbits, not its members. Solve one of each and read the rest through the transform that carries them there. The cost then tracks how symmetric the arrangement is rather than how big it is, so a more symmetric shape is cheaper per element, not dearer.

Found point

Points discovered rather than placed: the intersections a construction produces. Compass and straightedge as a data structure.

Cable routing

A connection drawn as a curve whose handles carry the direction. The handle length is the design: it grows with distance, holds a floor, and grows again when the target is behind the source.

Magnetic target

A hit area sized for the decision rather than for the mark. It can grow until it touches its neighbour, and that is the ceiling.

Signal flow

One moving mark per connection, on live connections only. Direction and liveness for free; put it on everything at once and it is wallpaper.

Reachability dim

Walk backwards from every output and dim whatever you never touch. Dead work looks dead, and a large graph becomes readable without being rearranged.

Proximity graph

Links drawn between things that are near each other right now, so connections form and break on live distance. The neighbour cap is the design: uncapped it stops reading as objects and starts reading as a hairball.

Staggered release

One event given a per-element delay taken from a spatial coordinate. Which direction the delay runs in decides where the expensive part of the effect happens.

Sphere trace

Step along a ray by the distance to the nearest surface. The scene is an equation, so there is no silhouette to tessellate and no resolution to choose.

Deferred read

Render normals and depth first, then draw the picture from those. Non-photoreal modes become image filters instead of geometry problems.

Occlusion oracle

Answer whether a point is visible by asking the scene directly rather than running a hidden-line algorithm. One ray, per pixel, against the same function the renderer already uses.

Bake the constant

Split what moves from what does not, render the part that does not once into a picture, and let the frame be a weighted sum of pictures. It buys quality that would be unaffordable per frame, and it costs the freedom to change the thing you baked.

Filled, not unblocked

A shadow disappears when another light reaches into it, not when the thing casting it stops existing. Obstacles stay obstacles; what changes is how many directions light arrives from.

Add in linear

Light adds where it is proportional to energy, not where it is proportional to display value. Summing sRGB piles the mid-tones up and clips them; sum in linear, tone map the total, convert once at the end.

Roll off, do not clip

A sum of lights exceeds one, and what happens next is the whole look. Clipping gives flat white shapes with hard borders; a compression curve keeps the shape of the highlight and desaturates it the way film does.

Break bands with a fixed hash

A long smooth gradient bands in eight bits. A hash keyed on the pixel breaks the bands and stays put; the same idea reseeded every frame does the same job in a still and boils in motion.

Draw it bigger

Render into a backing store larger than the box and let the browser resolve it down. The cheapest smoothness there is, and the easiest to forget, because nothing about the code looks wrong without it.

Cast wedge

A shadow built as geometry from the tangents of a light and an occluder rather than found per pixel. Two rays and a cap, exact at any zoom, one polygon.

Additive light

Overlapping light sums instead of covering. Two lamps make a third colour, and a shadow becomes the absence of one of them rather than a dark shape.

Light falloff

Brightness as a function of distance. The exponent is the mood, and it is a bigger decision than the colour: too shallow and the light floods the frame, leaving no dark for a shadow to be seen against.

Handoff

State visibly travelling between UI elements, so a system reads as a set of actors.