[Jack Cook]

Thanks, Adam,

I have 11.0, but this sounds like a good reason to upgrade. I think it could be very useful in the future.

Jack

[Jack Cook]

Well, I seem to have come up with a solution while messing with Mograph. I used a cloner object and a random effector and animated the seed of the effector, and it’s got a pretty good effect. No collision, though, but I think I can live with that.

Jack

[Jack Cook]

Thanks, Randy.

Jack

[Jack Cook]

I forgot to put in the link. Here it is:

https://www.base80.com/index.php/2007/01/29/align_to_spline_xpresso#more1

Jack

[Jack Cook]

John, I don’t know if this is exactly what you’re looking for, but here’s a tutorial about how to make an object follow the growth of a sweepNurbs object. I’ve used this to make an arrow grow in a similar way to what happens in your file.

Jack

[Jack Cook]

On this page at the bottom there is a Pyrocluster cloud file that is static. It may help you if you still want to use Pyrocluster. It’s at the bottom, called TP Fluffy Cloud. I have used this and it works, but it takes a long time to render, as do most Pyrocluster objects.

https://www.bonkers.de/download2/download.html

Jack

[Jack Cook]

Thanks, Randy. I’ve downloaded the tutorial and will give it a try.

Jack

[Jack Cook]

Damn, I was afraid you would say that! Thank you, Adam, I guess it’s time for me to learn a little bit about rigging. If I do this, I think I’ll save the rigged figure for future use, just in case.

thanks,
Jack

[Jack Cook]

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

[Jack Cook]

The object is (or will be, if I can find a way to make it) a 3D representation of data from a gas chromatograph, which is used to analyze chemical samples, in this case oil-polluted water. The data can be plotted as 3D graphs, some of which they’ve shown me. But they want to be able to have a movie showing a fly-around of the data in order to see the sample data all around it. It would be like a terrain, with large and small spikes instead of mountains and valleys. The data was generated in Excel, and they gave me the data file from that, formatted as Cinema wants it. I don’t think they have a way of generating or exporting an actual 3D model to give me, so I’m trying to make one. I’m not sure what other format would be useful in Cinema anyway – I haven’t actually done this type of thing very much. I’ve made terrains from data using grayscale height maps that clients have given me, but I don’t know that they can create one from this data. That could be a way to go, though – instead of thinking of it as a data plot, think of it as a terrain. I think I’ll ask the client about that (probably a long shot). Other than that, I think we may be out of luck on this one.

Jack