I Have been playing with MetaShapes in Blender, and I see there is positive & negative metashapes, would it be possible, for any object to have this feature, I then could use Beast to produce a field of grass, and set the grass to positive, then make a sphere and make this negative, then when the sphere is moved across the grass it would bend or move away depending upon the negatives field of influence, if the field of influence could be made bigger and smaller, it would be good too.
I was also thinking that maybe, the influence of the effect could somehow be linked to UV co-ordinates? so the effect strength could be “painted” onto the objects, with and without gradient, tips of the grass big influence bottom of the grass none, so grass would bend, and if the influence could have a “fade over time” setting -from “no fade” for footprints and tracks - to - “quick fade” for footprints and tracks in mud or sand
I have no knowledge of programming or python so please excuse me if this is totally rubbish
So is that anygood as an idea? would it be possible?
sounds like an interesting idea, unfortunately its not an easy thing to impliment. which will be your greatest problem in getting someone to program this.
Damn! Now I’ve got another thing to add to my experiment tree.
I see two ways to do this. The details are complex so let me just go with the basics:
If the cards are left as separate mesh objects, set up a system that expands on the “track to” constraints. Essentially you would be adding in a factor for distance from the tracking target. This factor would follow the inverse square law.
Combine the meshes into one object, and displace the vertices in each frame. You’d have to do some sort of field calculation, and find some way to keep the “root” vertices locked to the ground.
I’m probably making very little sense here. I’m kind of on a tear right now, trying to jot all my ideas down as they come to me.
One fairly solid thing I can say though, rather than having mesh objects be the effectors in your idea, why not use Empties? These can be scaled (can they be scaled non-uniformly? have to check) for magnitude, and much simpler. Also invisible when rendered
I’d say it’d be much easier to do it other way. like a lattice over all grasscards an deform the lattice somehow. to apply the deformation of a negative metaobject on a single lattice is easier… isnt it?
Of course, empties, I should have thought of that :o
one of the things I was thinking of was if a chracter was made, you could then set his feet & legs to be repulsors, for walking through grass n snow etc, but then you could use empties for wind etc, ha ha what would be fun to is if this could be used for particles too, rain deflecting from buildings, oh oh what about setting an object so that it can hold a certain number of particles, like snow landing on something.
I suppose I have a very simplistic view of all this not really understanding, the mechanicles or math if you like, in my mind its just a matter of one object saying get away from me, and then another saying come hither o fair one.
Oh I wish I could program, but I have NO idea were to start, and as for math,…well picture me waving my hand over my head…whooosh.
Ken
(maybe my sig should be - good ideas but no idea how to implement the ideas, if you get the idea? oh dear.)
