How to animate curve points

[chica]

Hello,

I want to animate a geometry (ex. a water pipe) using a curve as the driving motion. My idea was to create a curve and make it as a wire deformer for the pipe. The idea works, but the problem is, that now i cannot animate the points on the curve so as to animate the pipe. Do you have any suggestions, any ideas or is it something i am missing here? Thanks a lot in advance.

[fred]

softTransform, blendshapes, magnets, these are many ways to animate geometry...

Hello,

I want to animate a geometry (ex. a water pipe) using a curve as the driving motion. My idea was to create a curve and make it as a wire deformer for the pipe. The idea works, but the problem is, that now i cannot animate the points on the curve so as to animate the pipe. Do you have any suggestions, any ideas or is it something i am missing here? Thanks a lot in advance.

[chica]

thanks a lot fred. I would really appreciate if you could tell me if there is any way to animate the points in a curve... so as to animate a curve actually.

[fred]

What you mean? those are way to animate points of the curves, if you want you can also use point sop or vops as well or any deformers... it only depends what you wanna do...you can even carve a curve and resample it, that could also become a way to animate a curve....

[chica]

thanx again, just a last question: if i want to animate the points, i have to press q everytime i select a new point to get the controllers for it. that creates a new node (ex softTransform) everytime i do it which i then can key frame. The question is: if i have 10 points on the curve how can i just have 10 softTransorms instead of as many as i press the q to change back-and-forth?

[anim]

when in object context, press TAB with mouse over viewport and type Path, enter

you'll be in path tool which is similar to curve tool, but creates a Path CV object for each point making it easy to animate

if it's not what you need (or if it's too much since shape of curve depends also on scale and rotation of Path CVs) you can look inside the path1 object and examine how it's created

you can easily create similar setup by placing several Null objects then import their center points through Object Merge and connect with Add SOP, maybe convert to NURBS or Bezier, then you'll have curve dependent just on position of the nulls

there are also many different ways, for example with Point SOP and origin() expression based on the null objects using $PT variable so every point will inherit world position of corresponding null

[vi_rus]

Some time ago I stumbling in these problem too. In 3dmax point animation is much faster and easier. And than to solve these problem in houdini I wrote a python script.

Copy text and put it on the houdini shelf. Then select a points and click on the button.

And here is example of working my script.

pAnimmer_example.hip

pAnimmer.txt

Edited April 20, 2010 by vi_rus

[graham]

I wrote a Python SOP some time ago that basically does the above mentioned technique of creating points from objects and creates a curve (Polygon/NURBS/Bezier). It uses multiparms so you can quickly toggle controls on/off and whatnot. Nothing special but it keeps it all in one SOP operator. If invoked from the viewing pane it also allows you to select the objects you want to connect. Should also have a helpcard.

sop_curve_from_objects.otl

[chica]

Hello guys,

Thank you very much for the ideas and the material supplied. It is very usefull! Both the python scripts are great and give great knowledge. My problem is solved but apart from that I got some python ideas which is even better. It felt like a silly question to me, but I thought that someone else might have had the same problem. Thanks a lot once again.

[essencevfx]

you gotta love houdini for the multitude of options for a problem.. heres another one for you ..make your curves in to vector field, run through dops to add turb/vorticles/whatever, and advect your geometry through the fields hahha, you can get some very fun and interesting results using levelsets/fields to control geometry

Edited April 22, 2010 by essencevfx