Hello,
I’m trying to create some simple curved splines; basically one spline with thickness, that’s duplicated about 15 times, each one with some slight variation in thickness, bends and material. I have manually created this kind of thing before, but I’m sure there must be a more elegant way of doing it rather than duplicating splines as I did it before.
The splines should be able to grow, but their shape is fixed. The camera follows the growth along the spline.
I’ve drawn a spline, and did the incorrectly named “bevel” to turn it into a tube, and I can obviously add an Array modifier, then a Wave modifier (with a simple cloudy texture) to add a bit of random bendiness. I DO NOT want the wave modifier to animate; I’ve tried playing with the Time parameters, but can only get results when I hit play; the wave distortion propagates along the tube and is all wavey and animated. I want the waviness, but I want it to be static. I’ve tried keyframing the speed, to no avail.
If you set Life and Speed to zero, there should be no animation.
Shape would be defined by general settings.
If you don’t want to manually edit the curve, you can still replace those modifiers by geometry nodes.
Math node, Texture node, Float curve node plugged into a set position node can be used to displace a curve.
And you also have several options to instance or duplicate the curve, with Geometry Nodes.
You can also animate the growth, through Geometry Nodes.
Thank you…but - one crucial thing I forgot to mention - I’d figured out the Speed 0, but the wave only affects a very small portion of the spline. I obviously thought “Ah! Falloff! Height! Width! Those are the things to tweak!” but that makes very little difference - the wave just does not affect the whole curve.
I tried that - but it just moves the small area of displacement to difference areas of the curve - I almost found the answer - for some reason, setting the “Narrowness” to a tiny (but not zero) amount - eg. 0.001m - helps the distortion spread across a larger area - but still not the whole curve.
I just remembered that someone had made an Add-on that mimics C4D’s fields - it’s painful coming from C4D to Blender and never being able to visualise the Modifiers. I’ll try to hunt that add-on down.
I’m also going to (probably foolishly) try a geo nodes setup recommended by ChatGPT.
Thanks for the suggestion, but that doesn’t really give the required amount of random undulations along the length of the curve. In the end I’ve given up, and used After Effects:
I animated a null in space, then added a few more nulls (with an expression to link their positions to the first null) and added a wiggle expression to the position to give each null its own slightly random movement. I then used Stardust (plug-in) to create a particle system, and attached an emitter to each null.
I’d prefer to use Blender - faster renders, more precise 3D control etc, but I’ll have to stick with AE for now.
Oh - of course the ChatGPT geo nodes suggestion was just nonsense.
