I’ve been experimenting with a few techniques that I plan on using in my short film and I learning a lot. However, I realize how much it would have helped if someone had shown me some of the wierder techniques before I stumbled across them. As I did with “How to fake softbodies with a rigged character…”, I’ll give you a sample video and a .blend to play with and expand on.
Basically I wanted to have a small piece of glacier (or a bunch of them) move semi-realistically in choppy water without having to keyframe them by hand.
What I did was parent 4 empties to vertices in the water and tracked them to each other. I then used a copy rotation constraint from each of the empties to my glacier (in this case is an over-ramp-shaded cube). You can ‘adjust’ the turbulence of the affected object by moving the empties further away (less turbulent) from or closer (more turbulant) to each other.
hi, i was looking at your ocean .blend and i was wondering how you figured this out. i am trying to recreate a Maya tutorial regarding dynamic hoses. i know it’s different than yours but what i’m trying to do is replicate clusters in Maya in blender. i wanted to know how you set up the empties and the constraints. are the empties parented to vertices? if so, how? i have managed to parent object to vertices (i move the verts in Edit mode and they move the object but i can’t make the verts move by moving the object). i see that moving the empties in the scene moves the block and when i play back the animation the waves move. ok, too much rambling…
i have a nurbs curve (7 knots total), an empty on each end and one empty on the center knot. i want to parent the 3 knots on each end to their respective empties and parent the center knot to its respective emtpy, then parent the empties to cubes so that when i move the cubes the curve ends move. when i make a “vertex parent” the empty is parented to the knots:
3 knots (nurbs curve)
|
|_empty
so if i move the empty it moves but the knots don’t. if i got into Edit mode and move the knots, the empty moves. i want to move the empty and IT moves the verts (in object mode).
empty
|
|_3 knots (nurbs curve)
is this possible? i sort of got it to work using hooks, but the hook “centers” stay behind when moving the objects. i’ve been struggling with this for a few days now and it’s driving me batty.
I don’t know the limitations of nurbs curves, but I understand what your after. Could you send a link to the Maya doc, a sample .blend, or anything else I could play with to come up with a solution?
i had a scene built last night, then blender crashed and i lost it. i haven’t had time today to rebuld it (working). the Maya doc was in the last issue of 3DWorld magazine (has Shark Tale on the cover). I don’t have it or i would retype all the steps here, i’m trying to do it from memory, but i’ll see what i can do. i had mine set up with Hooks also, but when i moved the hooks, their centers or “pivots” didn’t move. i read something earlier today about parenting the “effector” to something else (i used an empty) and move the parent. something like that. it seemed to work on the 2 cubes example i made, but that’s just 2 cubes. i had built a tube connected to cubes connected to rectangles. i was keying one end flipping over the other like a slinky. it was working ok until i crashed it. i tried parenting the hook to mesh it was effecting… crash.
i’ll re-examine the scene file from the link you posted, i have the file already. guess i should look at it a little more closely.
I’m going to go off-topic if I post more on this thread. I really liked your floaty ocean sim, it’s cool and acts pretty realistically. It gives me ideas for something I’m going to start shortly once I finish up what I’m pulling my hair out over right now.
Thanks for posting the blend, your tinkering should provide useful for others!
