Re-timing Chops Driven Deformations

[srgb]

Hi all,

I've come into a bit of a problem with the beating mechanism for my heart model. I am using a heartbeat soundwave through CHOPs to drive the blend channel in a sequence blend SOP, essentially deforming the geometry between two states (attached image: file 3 is the bgeo of the heart). I started off using the magnet SOP with metaballs to do the deformation, but changed to the soft-transform SOP as it gave me better control for shaping the geometry. Everything works with the deformations.. my problem lies in the fact I want the soft-transformations to happen at different times (slightly after one another as the different areas of the heart expand/contract at different times).. at the moment they all happen at the same time. I have very little knowledge of expressions in general.. especially with regard to how I might delay the channel data feeding into the separate deformations (or its reaction to receiving that data) .

Anyone have any ideas? I wish I had more time to learn about expressions with regards to time, but my project due date is looming and I just don't have time to explore it. If anyone can set me off in the right direction I would be ever so grateful.

Thanks for your time ladies and gents.

Cheers,

srgb

[3dbeing]

I'm not 100% sure if this is what you want, but you might try the shift chop, and output the un-shifted to one deformer and the shifted to the other. Be sure to be working in frames, or at least be sure to be consistent if your in seconds work in seconds, frames work in frames.

hope that helps.

-3db