Balloon on a string, anim question

[dmcgrath]

The cool guys over at www.lostpencil.com have a pretty easy to follow tutorial on using springs.

I can tell you that after you do the tut, to apply it to a ballon for animation is pretty easy.

Make the pivot point of your ballon at the place where the string is to be tied. Also make that where the joint chain will end. Point constrain it to the end joint and orient constrain it to the joint before the end.

Then you can attach the curve that drives the joints directly to your characters hand(or whatever). And it will move around automatically during the animation.

You should also be able to apply wind and make it work, I think so.

I already tested it out and got pretty good results in about 10 minutes or so.

[matty2x4]

Hey thanks for that... do you have an exact link?
I have had a good look round the pencil site and cant find any spring thing.
sorry any www....?
matty

[dmcgrath]

Its on the right side, under, "free stuff". There is no exact link since it is buried inside a HTML Frame.

[Hugh]

I did a test of doing this myself a while ago.....

I had two joints from one end of the string to the other, with an IK handle on the end. I then point constrained the IK handle to a small sphere.

I added another sphere, point constrained to the base end of the string (the joint there), with a radius the same as the length of the string (actually, the length of the string, plus the radius of the small sphere.

I reversed the normals on the big sphere, and made is a passive rigid body, and made the small sphere an active rigid body.

I added in gravity, but set it to a negative value, so teh small sphere went up...

When the bottom end of the string was animated, the sphere at the top end bounced around as if it were on the end of a string. I tweaked it slightly by adding another field (not sure if the name - it attracted the small sphere) directly above the base of the string.

I didn't get as far as adding the string itself, but the next step was to make the string from cloth, and link it between the bottom and top ends.

[matty2x4]

thanks dmcgrath found it.

and thanks for the ideas Hugh.

I will hopefully have something to show soon(ish) and will let you know what and how I ended up using (if it looks any good and I arnt to embaresd...:) )
matty2x4

[butCherHeLL]

for you about this issue

http://www.nawyecky.com/tuts/tut-baloon.htm
Ballon and its string animate tutorial

:thumbsup:

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