I am having a problem with a project file, I would love to upload it but were at 400MB, even zipped its huge…
I have an object (a tentacle) that currently uses dynamic paint to allow use of modifiers such as displace to enlarge the mesh when something passes through it, but my mesh is fairly complex and when I use displace it makes some spikes and other nonsense.
the objects would be best described as a Giraffe’s long neck and it is eating something larger then the neck, like a cartoon!!! I would want to see the item go down the neck and scale that section of the mesh.
I have fiddled a lot with the shrink wrap, displace and solidify modifiers but the end result is an ugly mesh, so to speak…
Personally I would simply like to use a scale on the portion of the neck enlarging it. I imagine if this was possible it would look smoother.
I learnt this mesh trick by asking here and a nice bloke made this for me.
Now I dont know why his looks so smooth, maybe because my mesh is a little more complex. none the less my mesh looks crazy in wireframe mode, when it has object passing through
is there another way to accomplish this such as addon object modifiers?
You can’t smoothly animate a mesh with such topology. If you need to keep that shading, the easiest solution is to bake the normals to a mesh with a grid-like topology. This way you keed your special shading, while having a mesh with clean animatable topology.
Yes the mesh is messy for deformations. It’s possible to create a simpler helper mesh that deforms the more complex one, but one of the problems with the tentacle mesh is that it consist of unconnected pieces. The array doesn’t merge them and there are gaps, which is more apparent as they’re deformed.
In the file the tentacle is using surface deform modifier to follow the simpler helper mesh.
Vertex weight proximity (controlled by an empty or other non-rendering object) controlling a vertex group and a displace modifier controlled by the same vertex group should make it quite easy to get that effect. (Animate the empty, and the displacement bulge follows.) However if a mesh isn’t clean quads with consistent topology, that’s going to be the main cause of problems for most deformations.