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Some real wizardry required
I’m looking for a way to deform one object using another. Similar to a morph target, but not based on identical geometry.
The specifics are: I’ve got a relief map of an island at around 30,000 vertices. I’ve also got a list of points with coordinates (400 ascii entries) that fall within the island. At the moment the points are not part of a mesh, though they could be if needed. I want to use the new points to vary the height of the relief mesh.
I’m happy to do this via some kind of deformer, an expression, whatever. As long as I don’t need to add the points to the relief map geometry (as I may have to do this with 10,000 points as well.)
Thanks for any advice,
Will
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3 Replies
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Here’s a thought: you could copy the points into an empty spline object. First set it to linear and no intermediate points. So now you have your spline representing the deformed state. Copy the spline and project it from a top view onto the DEM. Copy the original (unprojected) spline again. Now (assuming you have Mocca) set up a Posemixer to morph the projected spline into the original spline. Finally, use the projected spline and posemixer splines in a spline deformer to affect the DEM.
It should work in theory, but if the mesh is really dense it could be painfully slow. Might be point order problems too. Anyway, worth a shot.
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One note, you’ll have to use the Structure Manager’s copy/paste commands to create the original spline.
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Thanks for this, Adam. Unfortunately, I’m not getting the results I need. There are a few issues I’m having with the spline deformer. Mainly that the spline’s shape is causing trenches to form in the DEM mesh.
But I think the bigger issue is this: I only want to deform the DEM mesh where there is a point above it to pull it. If you think of a mess of points floating above a landscape, I just want to pull the underlying landscape up to those points with some falloff.
I’m guessing there’s something out there that already does this. I was imagining an expression where I could convert the points to nulls and have them draw the lower mesh towards them as though I’d pulled them with a magnet.
If not, I’d be happy to pay someone to create this.
Thanks,
Will
BTW – I got your answer first!
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