I’ve tried to get this to work. I need the power of metaballs yet the texture mapping of a mesh. I’ve studied Metaball Texture and snagged the scene data from it to create this
it’s super easy to recreate my blend with the blend in the thread, just make a texture with a few circles on it and replace the noise texture in the metaball texture blend. I’ll upload it upon request but it’s just a texture swap at this point.
Now, what I need is for the texture to stay put yet merge with the nearest metaball just like the metaballs themselves do. So basically a metaball with a static texture wrapped around it. Not one that will shift, flow and stretch as you move the balls. The reason I need this is for my webcomic Growlution In particular please look at this page. (page 37 if someone is looking in the archives and the site engine has updated) the only thing that isn’t 3d is the thought balloon image and those colored things along the ground called nerts. I want to make the nerts 3d too and metaballs would probably be the best way. The nerts do not have a set shape, they are basically stiff blobs and they are absorbed by Zeep, the purple creature. Now I could use two metaball systems per nert and be done with it, but not only is that more complicated but may bog down my machine. Unlikely, since it’s a custom-built gaming rig but if I have a bunch of them then it just might if I have too many in a scene.
I’m just a perfectionist and unhappy with how the nerts look tacked on the image, which they are, and not part of Zeep’s world. It would look a lot better if the nert were to actually enter him in the 3d environment instead of being drawn in.
That’s… not possible, sorry. Metaballs don’t have UV maps, so they can’t have static textures. You could possibly convert the metaballs to mesh and then UV map them?
nuts, guess the double metaballs idea will have to work. I use a custom toon shader with freeform so at least I’ll have crisp lines around them.
I could convert and uv map them, but then I couldn’t really show them moving towards him. I imagine the nerts as … living silly putty globs with spots on them.
…
LMAO love the typos but i use Grammarly too and it didn’t complain about the metaball words, it actually helped to correct a mispelling.it just hatd the word nert.
but if there’s a better way then im all for it. I’ll look into sverchok
Edit: math and trig ugh, I know nothing about advanced math my education suffered due to being stuck in a behavior-modifying class that did nothing to stimulate my mind and everything to do with failing at making me a productive adult.
Meanwhile I think I really misunderstood what you meant by static, I thought you want them fix to world pos for all metaballs. Is this what you want? This is done without sverchok
What you have to be aware of is, that metaballs together implicitly define a new surface and if eg two metaball overlap there has to be some sort blending between concurrent inputs from the individual balls.
That is indeed interesting. Not what I wanted but interesting nonetheless and I would love to know how you did it. I basically want the texture to wrap around the metaballs as if it were a basic unwrapped shape, stretching across as more join so I don’t have to use 2 or more metaball systems (clumps of metaballs). I don’t know if that’s possible and I’m willing to use 2+ systems so I can have the nerts move and flow organically the way I want. I don’t want them to look forced or stilted. They have to be able to move and flow like…living slime, for want of a better word. Not those rpg slimes that are just a slimy orb but it stretches out and pulls itself back in to move around.
Yeah if you stick with the metaball representation and dont convert it you are limited to the generic texture mappigns offered by blender . There are several little tweaks you could do, to make the current mapping fit better. The texturing is anchored to the first metaball by default, ( btw. you can change that by defining another metaball as or even an empty in the texture coordinate node) and if you set the image texture to “extend” then you can use the mapping node to scale an place a texture roughly like in projection mapping
You should also place the metaballs under an empty and move that, relative placement under the empty should be used just for posing or deforming your nert.
But in the sum thats it. Things like UV project modifiers , manual uv maps and shrinkwrapping wont work with metaballs and need a mesh representation as opponent.
I got to thinking about using metaball deprived meshes. It would be easier, especially if I use an armature to gently warp them. I think if I create a bunch of them in many shapes then I can make nerts look organic with minimal post creation effort.
@Debuk, if you could toss that in a blend file for me to look at when I get the time that would be awesome but I really need to move it along and get to updating my comic. lol
Thank you for all your time and effort. For being so helpful I’ll share my simple yet versatile shader with you. Turn it into a group shader, plug things in and see the effects of it. I even uploaded it so you can play with it right out of the box. There’s bound to be a number of things you can do with it if you feel froggy enough. If you can improve it shoot me a PM. I might even feature the changes in my webcomic!
This is the final result. I wound up just duplicating, cutting them out and adjusting the verts with shrinkwrap above the surface. Nice crisp clean lines and no post-editing. Once I make a number of them and rig them I’m sure it will look great in the comic. Turns out I was overcomplicating things again. Sometimes I get an idea and overthink how to do it. Once perfected I can make them quickly and only need 2 mats per nert. Here we go, this is the kind of thing I wanted. Sorry about the late reply, I got super busy.
