C4D-like Bend deformer?

Support Modeling
#1

Hi,
Is there any addon or any way to reproduce the capability of the C4D Bend deformer in Blender?
The one in Blender, as far as I can tell, can’t do the same thing.
Have a look at this video:

You’ll notice how as opposed to the Blender one which bends from both sides at the same time, in C4D it only bends from one side. Then I can move the deformer itself to simulate a sort of roll-out effect or have just a corner of the plane bent by rotating the deformer.
This is of course non-destructive so it can be animated and changed at any point so that’s something I’m looking for in Blender too.

Thank you.

#2

I THINK you could do this with a Lattice mod.

#3

In Blender it may be easier to use the curve deform modifier for this particular effect.

#4

Hmm, the curve idea is pretty good, but not quite there. Thing is I’d like the bending to go to a circle and then be able to unroll from there.
Imagine putting a label on a bottle and then peeling it off.

In the meantime I found a cool add-on to generate parametric models (Sverchok) and that seems to have the needed tools. Unfortunately you need to bake the geometry it creates to be able to render it, so it’s destructive, so I can’t just animate the parameters and render.

#5

You can get similar results with a Simple Deform modifier set to “Bend” and an Empty object in the “Axis, Origin” slot. I played around with it a bit and it’s definitely possible to reproduce single frames of your example animation, but it’s incredibly tedious. In your example you’re just moving the modifier’s gizmo. To get similar results in Blender I had to set the plane’s pivot to the right position, move the Empty object, adjust the Deform Angle and adjust the Limits.

bentplane.blend (83.8 KB)

1 Like
#6

Yeah, that’s why it’s not really working as I want. It’s enough to do the bend, but to actually animate it is another thing entirely.

#7

The curve modifier should do the trick, it’s animatable, and it just follows any curve so you cant shape it like you need.

#8

Not really, as far as I can tell. I’m pretty much a noob at Blender, though, so I might be wrong.
First, to do that I’d need to animate the curve to have it bend. That really doesn’t help.
Second, when I move the curve the plane moves too. Like the plane is somehow attached to it, instead of having the curve affect it only when it gets in the area of the plane.
Even in the video posted above by pauljs75 you can see the left end of the plane moves.

#9

Apologies I didn’t see that was a video above.
I tried doing this but no dice, there seems to be a cutoff point in your example where vertices are simply not affected by the deformer, whereas in Blender vertices beyond the limits obey the closest “deformation point”, so to say, so they still move, even though they don’t bend. To be honest what I see in your example looks more natural and that’s the result I would expect. Not sure how to go about this, maybe with a splineIK ? Sounds overkill but I really have no other idea.

#10

With Sverchok “Viewer BMesh” there is no need of baking the geometry and you can animate the node tree using the “Frame Info” node an some “Map Range” nodes :slight_smile: