Is there any way to use a dynamic paint weight group with a shapekey?
I can set up the dynamic paint and shapekey, but when I set the dynamic paint group it does not appear to update for the shapekey.
What I want to do is create an unzip-style animation, where I am using 2 shape keys. (Base shape is closed, and next shape is open) I can assign a vertex group to this to get the partial unzip, but I need to animate the effect. When I set the vertex group to the dynamic paint vertex group, I can’t get it to update the shapekey based on the dynamic vertex group.
The short answer is that I don’t need to use dynamic paint, but I need to animate a selection set to achieve what I am trying to do, and this has worked well for other similar things.
The actual scene is quite large and complex, so I have made a simplified example and attached it here. Hopefully that shows better what I am trying to do here.
I have a workaround now that seems to be working well, although it’s added a few steps.
From what I can tell, shape keys happen at the base level of the object, as opposed to the stack of modifiers. since Dynamic paint is in the stack, it is not seen by the shape key when it updates. What I needed to do was to put something in the stack, so I am now using a mesh deform, and that is using the dynamic paint as a soft selection. The mesh deform has it’s own shapekey, and this all works because my dynamic paint soft selection is being used on the mesh deform, not on the shapekey. Hope that makes sense for anyone that may run into this in the future.
This is the method I am using now because it will allow me to get this done, but if anyone has a better way of achieving this I’d like to know for future use.
If it’s for a very simple shape, you could just change the brush from weight to displace and make it only pass over those verts that need to move. And get rid of the shapekey. To mimic your example you could have 3 displace brushes, 1 to move them both up on z, one to push the right side verts right on x, and one for -x. Does that feel klugdy and hackarific, kinda. :no: