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Using Bend Deformers
I’m having difficulties deforming an HVAC duct to get just the right look for the client for an animation and he’s just not satisfied by every version I come up with. Maybe it takes a combination of deformers to create the sag in the duct like shown in the embedded image. The product will be animated in and correct the deformations to form a perfect 90 degree bend in the duct, but all of my versions look choppy and tend to break up with sharp edges at the end of the Bend Deformer box. Any suggestions on how to get this sag in the duct caused by gravity?
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7 Replies
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Maybe a better approach would be to use a sweep nurbs for the duct and use the pose morph tag on the path spline to create the before/after animation?
Here’s a quick (imperfect) example: 5211_morphspline.c4d.zip
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I’m working in R12 Broadcast so I hope that’s a feature I can utilize. It does make more sense than simply using deformers, since it is basically morphing from one state to another and may also be a time-saver in the end. It’s an area I haven’t ventured into yet but I need to get up to speed on it since that’s the type of shape animation I’ll be doing quite a bit of in the future. I appreciate the tip very much, Adam.
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I think the morph tag is only available in the Studio bundle, but you should be able to do essentially the same thing by keyframing the spline points. You just have to turn on the PLA (point level animation) switch which is one of the incons on the right hand side of the time slider.
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Looking at the limitations in the Broadcast module I think a good option might be using dynamics on a cloner to morph between the states of two other cloners (using the Inheritance effector). You get some free dynamic springiness in this case too. I played with this for a little while and came up with something I like.
Dynamics can be a bit irritating to massage so here’s the c4d file as well.
Darby Edelen
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Darby,
That is terrific! I’m going to try your method because I think it allows for more dynamic options, but since I had to deliver this animation immediately I went with some simple point level animation and the client will probably go with that. I really must work toward upgrading to the Studio edition because I always seem to be working around the limitations of the Broadcast version. You and Adam have been so helpful in pointing me in the right direction. Bend Deformers have their place but they were just not the proper choice in this case.
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I think that tube looks great. Mind sharing how you made it? the modeling.
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in the download file Darby linked to, it’s just a sweepnurb for the duct and the ridges are made with a tile shader in the Displacement channel
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