Object turns into a blobby thing and then into another object

[Netvudu]

hi bunch,

I am going to start researching methods for this. Basically one object with its proper texture turns into a blobby sort of character and then turns into a different object.

I have a couple of ideas on how to make an object turn into a blobby thing or viceversa, but the second transformation got me a little stumped...

Basically, I find problematic starting with one object and ending with another which for starters might have a totally different number of polys. The "blobby" part isn´t worrying me as much as the "one object into another" part.

Any ideas?

[pclaes]

Are you wanting to do a volume or just an empty shell?

With the follow pop you can have particles go from one mesh to another - by remapping the pointnumbers and id's you can map them to different topologies.

You will need a property pop with an follow id so you can use individual particles as leaders in the follow pop. You will need several emitters, one for each object.

I made my own follow pop in vops (it's like a fancy blendshape where you remap/add/average a directional vector to the velocity/acceleration) because several follow pops don't play nice together. And with the one I made you can interpolate between different shapes with different topologies.

Personally I got really fed up with the follow pop and with pops in general, I think you can do much smarter "mapping" using a sopsolver. Imagine having just a bunch of source points and a bunch of target points, you could make the source points behave like boids. This would mean they would avoid eachother, you could then also set up trigger values on the target points. When a source point comes close, it will try to take hold of the target point... perhaps in a "first come first served" kind of way. If the point is still free it will take it. (I imagine it like a bunch of ants attacking a pile of rice, each one will want a piece of rice and will keep on looking for the next available piece until he has one.)

Once all the points have found a target point (if topologies are different you will have to kill(delete sop) or spawn(add sop) points), you can use that final 1 to 1 mapping to launch a new "follow pop" operation - but this time each point knows exactly where it needs to go.

If you want to do a volume, have a look at target driven volume advection. In terms of mapping one point to the next you will probably need to write some custom code to find the closest unused point. Every point will need to find it's most optimal corresponding neighbour that has not yet been used -> The part "that has not yet been used" means you'll have to do it in python as vex will not allow you to exclude points. The remapping is probably the hardest part.

An easy test is to sort the points by Y, but you will need more advanced mapping for complex shapes.

Edited December 17, 2009 by pclaes

[Netvudu]

An empty shell should be ok. Thanks for the detailed reply. The sopsolver part is quite over my head, but I cant give a try to the Follow POP method and see what I get.