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Animation Through Bend Deformers
Hello All.
I have a question in regards to animation through bend deformers.
I have set up an animation of a financial growth chart (which is very ironic considering the current economy I know). The animation consists of a 3D arrow snaking from the bottom to top right corner of a chart. The arrow shaft consists of a flattened rectangular block that is animated in position through a number of bend deformers thus giving the illusion that it is snaking it’s way across the graph. The arrow head is another 3D object that is made a child of the arrow shaft and thus follows along with the arrow shaft as it is animated. The problem is that since the arrow head is a child of the shaft it too deforms when it passes through a bend deformer.
My question is if there is any way to make the arrow head immune from deforming and simply follow along the precise path of the shaft? I have tried looking for a tag with no luck. Is there a better approach to generating an animation like this?
Any help would be very much appreciated.
Best regards,
Andrew -
3 Replies
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You should be able to do this without using any bend deformers. Make the arrow shaft grow by using a Sweep NURBS with a rectangular spline as the shape to sweep, and a bezier or other type of spline to sweep along. You can animate it growing from 0 to 100%. Then you can attach the arrow head as an object to the growing end by following this tutorial:
https://www.base80.com/index.php/2007/01/29/align_to_spline_xpresso#more153
It should do what you want it to do without deforming the arrowhead.
Jack
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Thank you very much for your help.
I did stumble across this method last night myself after posting and it works great if the arrow shapt is confined to a single plane; however, I have the shaft making a 90 degree on one axis and the a 50 degree bend on an orthogonal axis. This seems to produce very unpredictable behavior for the orientation of the arrow head as it tries to maintain a tangential orientation with respect to the spline path. Would a rail spline help?
Apparently there is a way to do this with xpresso and bend deformers? The bend deformer method seems to make orienting the arrow head easier when animating through orthogonal planes.
Thanks again for the help.
Regards,
Andrew -
Use the Base80 example it works fine for this. You need a rail to difine what way is up thats all.
Here is an example of a rail spline in this thread.
https://www.c4dcafe.com/ipb/index.php?showtopic=41970&hl=railHere is a tutorial:
https://www.c4dcafe.com/ipb/index.php?autocom=downloads&showfile=12Here is what my xpresso looked like I used Base 80 align and added some comtrols for the shaft growth. Its a user data slider that drives everything. The range mapper has both in and out puts pet to percentage and out bottom is a t 5%. Everything seemed to work.
/Randy
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