Translate bulge along path

[Petas]

Hello,

excuse my noobness, but i am looking for a way to translate a bulge along a curve path to deform a tube.

I have a tube and my curve, i add a metaball, to which i add a "follow path" constraint. The metaball moves along the path as i advance the timeline.

then comes the time i select the tube , then bulge using the metaball as magnet. i now have control on the bulge, but now the bulge stays static and does not follow the metaball's path anymore.

How can i achieve this?

For my needs, it would be even better if i could just translate the bulge on one of the curve's axis, instead of having it animated over time.

Thanks for any help !

Pierre D

[anim]

it's because Bulge shelf tool will extract the metaballs from the metaball object and ignore all the constraint

you can instead use Object Merge (with Into This Object mode) to merge your metaball into the tube object and plug into the bulge, that way it will always refer to the path constrained object and update accordingly

to control the position along path just dive inside of the constraint network and edit Position parameter on Follow Path CHOP

 

but maybe easier is to just use Carve SOP to extract point from position on the curve and copy your metaball there, see the file

bulge_along_curve.hip

[Petas]

Thank you Tomas !

It works perfect...You helped my understanding a lot.

Pierre DesRoberts