Jolyne's Thread
A Blender asset that recreates Jolyne Cujoh's string from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean. Draw a Bézier curve and Geometry Nodes builds the thread along it, lettering included, so a thread is posed and animated by editing a curve.
The loop above is from a lyric video I made to show how an artist could use the thread.
- Built the thread mesh and its text in Geometry Nodes. Both follow any Bézier spline and update as it is edited.
- Gave artists controls for radius and graphic fidelity, and for the text's position, spacing, rotation, scale and animated noise.
BlenderGeometry NodesShader Editor
The Jolyne model in the video is by DarienToad on Sketchfab.
The thread
The thread is a mesh that Geometry Nodes rebuilds from the spline whenever the spline changes, so it keeps its look at any length or curvature.
The endcaps follow the rotation and orientation of the rest of the thread.
The text
Text runs along the thread, and each part of it is a setting: position, spacing, rotation, scale and animated noise. Everything in this loop comes from those settings alone.
The graph builds the text meshes, samples the curve's position and rotation, lifts the text by an elevation value and rotates it around the curve, with separate noise on rotation, scale and translation. Getting there meant breaking the problem into parts and working through the vector math.
The texture
The thread's color comes from a color ramp in the Shader Editor. Scrubbing the ramp changes the texture along the thread, as in this loop.
The texture also adjusts with distance, so the thread still reads when it is far from the camera.
Limits and next steps
The biggest limit: the number of control points has to stay the same for a whole animation, and new points can only be added at the end of the curve. A custom curve type is the likely fix.
Next, I want to add a layer of abstraction so the thread itself follows a curve, which should make it easier for artists to pose, and to improve the texture mapping.
100 Days of Tech Art
This was Project 1 of 100 Days of Tech Art, my plan to spend a hundred days on tech art projects and log every day in a public journal. It stopped early: RIT's Magic Maker Program funded my team to make Mushroom Kid's Big Grass Sword, and partway through that, Respawn brought me in. Both were good reasons to stop counting.