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Laser “Carving” to jump segments
I’m hoping someone can help me out with my Xpresso setup here. I have three shapes that I want to appear as though a laser is sort of carving them out. In my setup the laser only traces the path of the first object. I know in order for it to jump to the next one I have to change the segment value on the Align to Spline Expression. Is there a way to set it up somehow so it automatically increases the value as necessary to trace the separate objects?
Thanks for any help!
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6 Replies
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this is a brute force approach just keyframed – isn’t great frame by frame but isn’t bad at speed – just a bit of xpresso to make the laser light end at the spline and not overshoot.
8510_lasercarvingbruteforce.c4d.zip
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and an xpresso solution using the Spline Node – bit of a pain since the spline node is just like the Align to Spline tag, if you use all the segments 50% of the way through is 50% of the actual length of all the segments together but in the Sweep Object, 50% is 1/2 way through the second segment – totally ignoring the different lengths of each segment. So either the spline node has to be sped up to keep up with the Sweep or the Sweep slowed down. The math seemed easier to speed up the spline node but it’s not the only way.
8511_lasercarvingsplinenode.c4d.zip
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Thanks for the help! After playing around a bit before there were any replies to this thread I arrived at somewhat of a different “fix”. I’ve attached the file in case anyone is interested.
I was hoping there was a much easier method which would allow me to easily replace the shapes being traced with anything I wanted and still have it jump segments. -
this one will take whatever spline is being swept along and automatically adjust for number of segments
8513_lasercarvingsplinenode2.c4d.zip
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That is EXACTLY what I was looking for! Thank you!
Your XGroup setup is a bit beyond my current skills in XPresso, no way I would have figured that setup out. I’m having quite a time just trying to figure out quite how your setup is doing what its doing.Do you have any suggestions on how to better learn XPresso?
Thanks again.
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I’ve just practised by looking at what others have done and taking it apart figuring out how it works – reading the help – there are a couple tutorials out there – there was something interesting from the 2014 Siggraph by Tim Clapham, not so much for the xpresso itself but for how he works with it’s interface – I’ve seen other videos like that but sorry couldn’t tell you where.
Other than that it helps to have programmed/scripted and to know kind of what you want to happen then just find the way for xpresso to do that.
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