Hi: i d like to animate a cable.
it is actually a circle curve running along a path curve.
At one moment the path has a particular shape
A moment latter the path is different and the cable twisted.
Can i create shapekeys with curves ?
I would be able to animate my cable with IPOS…
It seems i can’t.
You can animate your cable by selecting the control points of your curve one at a time, and pressing Ctrl-H. Select add empty for the Hook, and an empty will now be “parented” to the control point. The reason I say one at a time is that it is possible to add one hook to all the points, but this would not allow you to key motion for each point.
After you have all the empties in place, you can set keyframes with ‘I’ for location -rotation, and record the animation this way. Simply, key ‘I’ for each empty at frame 1, then go to frame 10 and move them around, then key ‘I’ again for each, repeating as you position the empties.
When you are done, press alt-A and watch the animation to see if you need to make any changes. Tip: I usually key the positions at the start frame and the end frame the same before I mess with anything, so it will loop better if I need to do so. You could also select each empty’s ipo and duplicate keyframes that way, but that’s sometimes a lot of work.
Remember to bump up the render resolution for your curve, and remember you can do the above process not just for the body main curve, but also for the bevelobject curve and for the taper object curve, making for really cool transformations.
I’m not an expert, it just happens to be an interest of mine - really interesting stuff could happen if I ever get used to importing curves from illustrator that aren’t too complex to work with.
Have fun, and remember to post something if it’s cool
PM me if you need any more explanations, but I got most of my info from video tuts made after Elephants Dream by Slikdigit, I think. An Spin had a really good thread on using curves for making industrial hoses - cool stuff.
I know, it would seem a script would need to be written to automate adding the empties to the control points, then vertex parenting verts in a generic mesh that would be used for making the shapekeys to control the hooks. I did get something along these lines to work, but the curve movements are not as precise without a LOT of work. I’m still experimenting with that, so maybe I can upload a file that uses them to illustrate how it could work.
If it is possible to create shape keys with curves already, I haven’t found it. I’ll keep hoping though
Your mathod works nicely Craig. I think the slight problemis that you cant control the handles of the curve(bezier) can you ?
I ll try this hook on the handles right now ! Maybe it is possible…
You can definitely control the control handles the same way, but you have to carefully move the hook with regard to what it is doing to he handle AND the center control point - I found out the hard way that sometimes it was best to move the hooks on all three parts together, then adjust the ones to the handles.
With shape keys on a mesh vertex parented to the empties that are hooked to the curve (very tedious) it is still possible to control the handles, but that is assuming that you have enough verts in the mesh to assign to those handles’ hooks. Complicated very quickly.
I’ve been experimenting with using cubes for each hook empty, but all of them in one mesh, assigned each cube to a vert group in the mesh, and a single vert in the cube vertex parented to the hook - then I am trying to make a shapekey set up so I can use the sliders
If I get one finished this weekend, I’ll post it up. I think I’m going to have to learn python so I can try to automate this. Could be a good starting point,hmm?