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Newbie deformer question…
Oh another one of those nights spending 8 hours on what I expected to take 5 minutes, part of the game I guess…
Anyway…What I’m trying to do is deform a plane so that a spherical bulge travels through the plane. Something like the age old CG example of planets bending space time, or a bowling ball rolling around a trampoline…
I tried both the spherify deformer and the bulge deformer. While the distortion with spherify is good, the deformer slides the entire plane around in space (I want the plane to stay put, like a canvas within stretcher bars). On the other hand, the buldge deformer, when set to the affect region mode, correctly affects the plane in the locality of the deformer box. However the buldge doesn’t have that spherical look and just bulges on 2 axis.
I checked this old post out but still can’t get it to work…https://forums.creativecow.net/archivethread/19/208069#208243
In short, is there a way to use the spherical deformer but only in specific range of the environment so my plane doesn’t slide around?
Thanks a bunch in advance…
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4 Replies
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I can’t think of anything other than Proximal in the displacement channel (you’d have to render to see it) or if you want a really clean edged hole use a boolean (the floor would have to be a box)
the proximal could look like this example (old – back before Proximal had been absorbed from the SLA set) from Jeremy W – https://biovisioning.com/C4D_Stuff/Prox.html – it can be tightened a lot by adjusting the parameters in the Proximal in the floor material
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Cool thanks, I’m gonna check out this method soon. Also got some other ideas that may interest you (haven’t tried them yet) here: https://www.c4dcafe.com/ipb/index.php?showtopic=45217
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it looks like the Spherify with the restriction map works as long as you don’t want to be near the edges. The same definitely goes for a MoGraph Displacement deformer.
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You might try a formula deformer on the plane. If the plane is normal to the Y-Axis (which it is by default when created), try this formula:
-1/(.5*sqrt(4+256*sqrt(u*u+v*v)))with the effect set to Y-Radial, and you’ll get a parabolic depression in the middle of the plane, while the rest of the plane stays (almost) flat. You can adjust the values to change the size and depth of the depression (the numbers .5, 4, & 256). You can get a slightly different curve if you replace u & v in the formula with x & z.
If you move the deformer, the depression moves around in the plane. However, the depth of the deformation varies slightly as the position changes; I haven’t checked the formulat to see if that’s inherent to the math, or if it’s possibly because of the way the polygons are cut.
You might want to make the plane a child of a HyperNURBS object, too, so you get a smoother bottom to the depression.
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