Animation Nodes in Blender 2.8 can make math less daunting than usual. In the first part of this series Frederik Steinmetz shows how to convert a mathematical formula into an animation nodes tree that procedurally creates the famous trefoil knot.
Computer graphics and math are a pretty close crew. In fact the pretty images that come out of CGI programs like Blender are made possible because the computer is doing lots and lots of math for us. This computational complexity is hidden away from the user and Blender makes no exception. But there are a few places where we can still dig deeper, namely in compositing, shading and animation nodes. And let's not forget to throw drivers into the mix.
Since math and arts meet in computer graphics, why not use it to learn a bit of math while creating beautiful images (or vice versa). Frederik Steinmetz shows how to use Animation Nodes for some procedural modeling. The example is the famous trefoil knot. Find out how to convert a mathematical formula into a set of nodes that can be used to animate an object along a path or visualized directly as a bezier curve. The final node tree is as follows:
.blend file for this tutorial is availbale to Patreon scholars.