Another cross post from Facebook. This was a question i had been looking for a answer to recently.
Zach Michels - If I had a Navigator, could I spin shapes I am making in Cortex from Cortex ramps? Most of the videos I see with Navigator are doing exciting things, but I don’t feel like I’ve seen examples of this. I understand that with the release of Shapechanger this will be possible, right? Any one who has a Navigator wanna make an example video?
Cheers all.
Lars Larsen - The missing ingredient for what you’re describing is an H/V mirroring (saw-to-triangle) circuit. If you want to rotate a 2D shape, you need to rotate the ramp waveforms, THEN perform H/V mirroring/saw-to-triangle conversion on both ramps, and then you would be ready to mix or combine them in some way to create a 2D shape key.
Navigator includes the facility for mirroring, but its mirrors are placed BEFORE rotation, in the signal path – this is great for quadrilateral/bilateral mirroring when feeding Shapechanger, but does little if you want to create a rotated shape without the Navigator+Shapechanger combo.
Lars Larsen - To make myself doubly clear, (1) The Navigator+Shapechanger combo gives full 2D shape generation/rotation (in the spinning the shape clockwise/ccw sense.) (2) If you want to do this with Navigator alone, you need a way to (a) mirror your HV ramps post-Navigator, (b) mix/combine them in some way, (c) generate a key of that mix, such as with Doorway or Cortex. FYI, Staircase is five mirror circuits in series! So a pair of them could mirror H/V and then keep going…
Lars Larsen - In fact, Navigator+2xStaircase makes for a pretty interesting pattern/geometry voice in its own right. These kind of relationships are what the XY series modules are all about!
Lars Larsen - When imagining patches, it may also be helpful to think of Navigator as positioning/rotating a camera, rather than the shape itself.
Zach Michels - Ok… more like rotating the reference frame than the object kind of?
Lars Larsen - Yes! Because everything derived from the ramps which have been rotated will have their own geometries rotated identically. Say you have a Navigator with HV outs multed to 2x Shapechangers. One creates an ellipse, another a squiggle. When the Navigator rotates the ramps, both shapes will rotate, as if a camera pointed at them is spinning.
Lars Larsen - For me, a video synthesizer “voice” consists of 2 components: one for spatial parameters (position and rotation) and one for geometry (width/height, curve). Think of it like the VCF-to-VCA relationship in a monosynth. Usually the VCF is before the VCA, but you can also do it the other way around create different and interesting results. Navigator+Shapechanger present to you a holistic approach to the spatial+goemetry processor concept, but there are other ways to patch up the essential pieces of ramp processing based shape generation.
