Thinkg is: To get REAL moon phases, I think one has to gradually increase the radius/diameter of the shadow circle until half moon, when it’s almost infinite, so you get a perfect half circle, then the same again in a negative progression.
What I’ve been doing so far is just sliding one circle on top of another. Which means the moon itself always has a convex form. Which is fine for my simple face (and my other faces where the moon is relatively “symbolic”, but doesn’t cut it in reality.
I will wrap my brain around this. But now I’ll drink, because it’s my 56th birthday. Cheers!!
Great thoughts and examples!! Still affixated to my shape-only thing, I must admit, gotta get this out of my system.
I tried a bit of exp() tomfoolery for the waxing phase:
Gotta make the exponential curve more extreme - slower at the beginning, to preserve the “sickle” shape longer. Could well be I’m getting there, though. Might get a ChatGPT account sooner or later for the guesswork - would probably save some fruitless thinking time …
Also, I know all about the fixations. I try to do as much with text as possible, though that is partially laziness and declutter as you can have one element for active and dim screens.
Currently dual fixating on mask template making and delving into uses for complex contitionals and their limitations.
I do admire these text magic examples - it’s a very impressive method, and I really can’t see much lazyness there. I would love to give this field a go soon - completely different field of un-knowledge on my part
Yes. I think so. You need either a left and right mode or a hollow circle that can be huge around or small in.
See my failed one made by trail and error with serial conditions for each phase, rather than a calculation. Totally falls over on a watch but works in creator to give a visual:
When the face loads onto a watch it sets the phase but then cannot move. I found methods that worked better and did not need a spreadsheet to generate the expressions. Here is that BTW, in case it is useful as a black box to check your number calculations:
for a “moon-shadow hand” rotation, I could as well take the #MOONAGEPERCENT# tag as basis. Which would really save formula space in the future. BUT: is #MOONAGEPERCENT# sync’d to the watch location? Or is it UTC-based? Can’t find info on that.
Others will know that better than I but I’m going to punt that it is location based as Facer is just using information provided by the watch OS and I’m pretty certain Google would have had complaints if their moon data only worked over their HQ, or Greenwich.
