Hi guys, I’ve had some time to think about the problem. I’m looking to have the distortions produced from twisting, nudging, and bulging vertices change their central positions from frame to frame to match the new location of a character in a video texture.
The warp modifier almost does this, but I don’t have much control over how it distorts the mesh. The distortions needs to stay within the X and Y axises of the plane. I also don’t have the ability to distort by twisting.
Dynamic paint doesn’t help either. It’s just good for dynamically creating a vertex group which could be used to restrict the effect of the warp modifier. It won’t allow me to do the same things I can do with the twist and nudge sculpt tools. I would also like to use shapekeys (or something similar) to shift between the warped and unwarped textures.
I think I can achieve what I want to do by moving the UVmap and camera at the same time. I used the UVwarp modifier to do this, but now I’m having trouble getting it to move the UVmap at the same rate the camera moves. I think it needs a new parameter that we could use to adjust how much to move the UVmap in relation to another object.
Here is the project and video file. I had to compress it so that the site would let me upload it:
warpingVideo.zip (3.0 MB)
I also almost had some luck producing the effect I want using nodes by keeping the image in one spot while the plane moves. Transforming the UVmap to world space and adding it to window coordinates almost does this. The trouble is that the UVmap repeats itself and there is still some movement. A node based approach is probably beyond my understanding atm.
Edit: I decided to open a new thread about this. Please respond to this post here.