Bulge Along Path

[Guest]

Hey there!

Downloaded Apprentice, just trying to learn the basics, and I'm rather stuck. I apologize beforehand if my terms/words aren't the right ones, not quite sure what some things are called.

I'm trying to create an animated bulge along a path, a la Bugs Bunny (check this for reference: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFM8i6jJFOc).

Is the Trail node the best way to make the path stay bulged? It's not caching, so can't scrub through it very well -- each frame takes a while to solve. Surely there's a better way?

Current progress: http://vimeo.com/4125029

I've got a basic grid and metaball piping into a bulge node (followed by a trail node, so that the bulge stays), and I'm wondering how I would go about binding the position of the metaball to a path/curve I've created; using a transform node I can animate it by keyframes, but that doesn't allow the same amount of control granted by linking it to a path.

I know there's the Follow Path operator in the shelf, but if I get a metaball following a curve in the Object network top level, I can't pipe it into the Bulge node which is within the grid geo node; been mucking about for a while and can't figure this one out.

Edit: Used this to get it.

Edited April 13, 2009 by Guest

[edward]

The Carve SOP can be animated to give you a "growing" curve. Here's a simple attempt.

wireBulge.hipnc

[Guest]

The Carve SOP can be animated to give you a "growing" curve. Here's a simple attempt.

This is fantastic, thanks!

If you don't mind my asking, would you mind explaining it a bit? Rather learn this, as opposed to just blindly using it.

To go over my understanding, the wirecapture node takes the wire it's given and 'applies' it to the surface, using wire vertices to create deform points/weights; this in turn is fed to the wiredeform node which takes the wire and a modified version of it (transform node), and deforms the original geo with the difference between the rest wire and deform wire using the weights created in the wirecapture node.

Convoluted, sure, but is this about right?

[edward]

Yes. The wire deformer actually uses the closest parametric position of the curve so the curve points don't matter too much in terms of weights. I just used it because it was a quick way to deform it.