Animating Extrusion of wires/tubes

[Spiffjackson]

I was unable to see the video for some reason, but anyways.

one way you can do it is to create a nurbs circle or square, then create a curve. in the nurbs modeling options there is an extrued function. select both objects and run this extrude with (tubes and at path turned on). once this is done you will have your extruded tube in the workspace. on the channel box in the inputs section there will be two nodes for the sub-curves. from there you can keyframe the length of the extrusion over time from start to end.

That is my method for pulling off this effect. there may be others, but this is sure to work.

[stallion151]

holey dooley, now that is art. Some of the best digital art i've seen. Its so beautiful.

I think that the person would of made a section of the geometry, say one 45º piece and instanced it all the way around.

and what spiffjackson said is probably the easiest way. then you could appy a ramp to the U or V coord and make that your bright luminosity and when you animate the subCurve the ramp should stay at the tip and follow the curve building.

[jrouse]

Hey that was great advise from both of you. However, I crashed maya, of course, and now it doesnt show me the input for the sub-curves. I have no idea why. I DID IT ONCE. Now no more sub curves at all. How could this be?

[Spiffjackson]

whoa! that is strange. what type of system are you running maya on? that is pretty important to know how to fix an error like this. other than starting over from scratch, i think you might want to try reinsalling maya. i know it is a hassle, but sometimes you gotta go the hard road to trouble shoot a problem.

I wish my browser would allow me to view the video. I am using Opera instead of internet explorer (infested with popups for some reason).

im glad it worked for you the first time anyway.

[jrouse]

Hey. This method only works with bezier extrusions. Not nurbs.

[stallion151]

just to make sure, select your nurbs circle first, then your curve, and apply the surface>extrude.....choose Tube, At Path, Component, Profiile Normal, 0º rotation, 1 scale,
partial, nurbs.

if it doesn't work, try rebuilding your curve....Uniform, 0#spans, CVs, and cubic.
um if that doesn't work, try it again in a brand new scene, empty of everything else.
If that doesn't help. delete your maya preferences, if that doesn't help, re-install maya.

usually try to solve the problem before re-installing maya, and even before you do that, deleting your prefs, can often help.

[stallion151]

and then if only bezier curves work use those, to save your hair.

[edley]

Spiff, I'm animating some fluid flow through piping and that technique worked great for me except for one thing. I noticed that when playing back the animation of the extrusion the movement decelerates as it moves through a bend, say a 90 degree bend as you would find in piping. Once it passes through the bend it accelerates and moves at a constant rate until it reaches another bend or change of direction where it decelerates. Is this because it is encountering more vertices at the bends? Is there a way to maintain a constant speed through the entire extrusion? I should mention that I haven't done a final render yet, only a preview in Playblast. Thanks for any input. edley

Maya 5.0 Complete
Macintosh G4 Silver Bullet 1.4 GHz Dual Processor
OSX 10.2

[Spiffjackson]

I would try using the rebuild curve tool to lighten the load of control points in your curve. If the problem persists, then Im not sure what is happening. I will try it for myself and see what type of work around I can come up with.

clint

[Spiffjackson]

Here take a look at this. I created a cv curve that had I think 8 spans. I was getting the same problem that you did. So I used rebuild curve tool and changed it to 100 spans. And awalla! it worked. the extrusion maintains it's velocity throughout the entire curve. I set it to 100 because it seemed like anything lower was deforming my curve a little bit if not a lot.


hope that helps you. I did an example playblast.

check it out here.

www.dvdpowertools.com/clint/animatedExtrude.avi (http://www.dvdpowertools.com/clint/animatedExtrude.avi)

[edley]

Spiff, I increased the spans and it works great! Thanks for the help. You gotta love this forum. edley

[Spiffjackson]

edley, im glad it worked well for you. It is nice to be able to help people with issues such as this. Sometimes I feel like I konw more than I realize I know.


have a good weekend.


clint

[misterdi]

Spiff, I'm animating some fluid flow through piping and that technique worked great for me except for one thing. I noticed that when playing back the animation of the extrusion the movement decelerates as it moves through a bend, say a 90 degree bend as you would find in piping. Once it passes through the bend it accelerates and moves at a constant rate until it reaches another bend or change of direction where it decelerates. Is this because it is encountering more vertices at the bends?

Maybe that's because the U value distribution in the curve is not even, when it is on a bend you have more CVs on that area (each knot will be space closely) while on the straight segment distance between knots are greater.

As the extrude look at the u parameter distribution on the path curve, it will be slower when the are more knots in small distance and faster when the knots is in greater distance.

You may want to rebuilt the u parameterization using Non-uniform distribution or adding a lot more span will distribute the u more even.

Best regards,

[Mistri]

select your nurbs circle first, then your curve, and apply the surface>extrude.....choose Tube, At Path, Component, Profiile Normal, 0º rotation, 1 scale,
partial, nurbs.

Ok, but where can I animate the extrusion? The lenght can be animatend only in distance mode, not in tube mode.

[Spiffjackson]

you animate it with the subcurve1 and subcurve2 nodes in the bottom of the channel box

[chesterjoe]

Hi guys, I'm new to maya migrating from xsi and max, This is something I really needed to do and did not know how in maya. The problem is I just can't get it to work. I know I must be doing something wrogn but what?

I extrude the curve along the path (tube, at path, component,profile normal, rotation 0, scale 1, partial) I get the two subcurves in the channel box, but the only parameters I get for those subcurves are: min value:0 max value:1 wich change the radius of the extrusion but not its length. and I have another input called extrude wich has several parameters including length and scale, but length changes nothing when I change it, and scale translates the extrusion away from my curve. So what am I doing wrong? (my selected object is the extrusion itself. what parameter do I have to keyframe? I'm lost :( thanks in advance guys. It's tough to be a newbie again after all this years :(

[chesterjoe]

Ok, sorry, I found out I had to change subcurve2 max value, I thought I already checked that out, but seems I did not, maybe I was always changing subcurve1 values.

Anyway now it works, but in the opposite direction of what I need, is there an easy way of inverting how it scales/travels? do I have to redraw my curve but start from the end up? or can I change the order of my first and last points in that curve? or something like that? thanks again.... ( btw I did it with a nurbs extrusion so it also works with nurbs, at list for me, I'm on maya 6 / windows)


Joe

EDIT: ok I solved it with reverse curve direction command. Sorry again for asking without checking extensively, but It is kind of frustrating when you're in a hurry with a new software :sad:

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