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Muscles


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howdy, i got a few questions. ( posted this over at the SESI forum as well )

i have been trying to construct a single working muscle that ill be able to reuse as an operator later. that will be able to be snapped into position by piping 2 nulls into the operator. ( a top and bottom null ). the top and bottom nulls of the muscle are parented to different bones so that when a limb bends the muscles can stretch/bulge.

so what im thinking of doing is, making a path with 2 verts. both its points are at 0. then when i pipe in nulls the verts of the path will snap into position where the nulls are.

i then make more nulls that follow the path orientation, and position them somewhere along the curve. ( lets say i have 3-4 nulls along the curve )

the curves themselves will be oriented to fit the mesh in object level.

then. this is where i get kind of confused. but what i want to do is make a geometry operator, and within it will be magnets that will take up the exact positions of the nulls along the muscle curve. so that when the curve gets shorter, the nulls on the muscles come together, and the magnets travel under the skin, bulging parts out. as a real muscle would.,

the problem is however, that i have no idea how to grab/copy the exact position of the nulls in world space that are following a curve, and paste the relative refs to sub object level operators. i think that once i can do this then the rest should be a breeze.

but since the nulls along the curve never have a changing transform in world space, i cant use that as a reference for the magnets to use.

cheers.

{EDIT}

just wanted to show, that the magnets would be where you currently see the spheres. the spheres are snapped to nulls. and its those nulls i cant gather the worldspace coordinates of.

just a cheap viewgrab. ( 1 meg video )

http://ambient-whisper.cgcommunity.com/ima...les-02-divx.avi

_________________

-m-k-

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Hiya

So you've already got the nulls to follow the curve and now just need their transforms? Or are you having issues getting the nulls to follow along?

Cheers

Marc

P.S. If you want to pm me the file I can take a look for you.... (it might be easier than explaining :))

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thanks for the response.

edward actually told me how to find any elements position, so all is working well.

heres his answer:

The vtorigin("","/obj/mynull") expression can obtain obj world-space

coordinates without regards to parenting. Since this function returns a

vector, you can access its individual components like so:

vtorigin("","/obj/mynull") [0]

vtorigin("","/obj/mynull") [1]

vtorigin("","/obj/mynull") [2]

next step is to add softbodies :) but gotta learn to use them first, because i havent gotten any good results with them yet.

( ill be documenting the rig later if the results are good. )

cheers :)

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