Growing Vine using sweep -- problems growing

[Troyan]

Having recently wrestled with your exact problem (except for me it was blood vessels), you have 2 options.

1) The quick and dirty way that you are using with Sweep nurbs. The difference being is don't animate the End Growth in your Sweep Nurbs, rather unfold the "Details" tab that shows you the graph of the scale and rotation of your sweep and animate the right side of the Scale. Just drop the far right verticie all the way to the bottom, add an extra verticies just to the left of it, lower that all the way to the bottom and animate it moving from the far left to the far right.

2) The more sophistacated way is to use Spline Wrap and Xpresso. We've created a system that you can set up and control the growth of ad nauseum "vines" by using 1 slider and editing a slider for each individual vine to grow at different rates. I'll try and simplify it and post it here for the community consumption shortly.

[soccerrprp]

Thanks Troyan. I would appreciate seeing your setup.

Richard

[AAAron]

Or have a look at aix sponzas free and excellent "spline on spline" plugin and animate the spline length in the plugin parameters instead. The sweep nurbs object will se it as a full grown spline all the time, avoiding your problem.

http://www.aixsponza.com

[Troyan]

For what it's worth, here it is

http://www.thedanse.com/cgtalk/

Called "SimpleVineGrower"

If you add or delete vines you have to add or delete the appropriate code in the Xpresso editor. There should be a slider in the HUD that lets you play with the vines. Click on the Xpresso tag to see the offset sliders for each vine as well.

[Troyan]

Or have a look at aix sponzas free and excellent "spline on spline" plugin and animate the spline length in the plugin parameters instead. The sweep nurbs object will se it as a full grown spline all the time, avoiding your problem.

http://www.aixsponza.com

Very true. The best solution and can grow sub splines. Only problem is I've installed it and can't find any way to access it in R10.5. Not showing up under Plugins. How are you supposed to use it?

[AAAron]

Are you on mac or PC? It shows up under PC on my R 10.5. I´m using version 1.2 of Splineonspline btw.

[Troyan]

Are you on mac or PC? It shows up under PC on my R 10.5. I´m using version 1.2 of Splineonspline btw.

I'm on Mac and that version is PC only. They are supposed to send me a Mac version later today.

[AAAron]

I see. Nice of them to compile a mac version!

[Navstar]

Thanks for the posts! That's an ingenious solution, Troyan!

Is Aixsponza going to post the Mac Splineonspline 1.2 on their website? I only see v1.1 being Mac compatible.

[Troyan]

Thanks for the posts! That's an ingenious solution, Troyan!

Is Aixsponza going to post the Mac Splineonspline 1.2 on their website? I only see v1.1 being Mac compatible.

He told me soon and was going to try and get me a Mac version today. If he does I'll shoot it over to you.

T

[unseenthings]

Thanks for the posts! That's an ingenious solution, Troyan!
Glad you like it... In case you're wondering what the offset is for, if you have splines of differing lengths, you can use that to line up all of the splines so they move at the same time/rate, or if you want to have some of them start already "grown" up the splines, you can use the individual offsets. The downside is that you have to go in and copy and paste xpresso (and tie it together) if you want to add more splines....

It's probably not the most elegant solution, but it worked really well for us. I'm certain there was probably a better way to approach the problem, but with deadlines pending, it got the job done and allowed enough flexibility to be used later. I'm not an xpresso master just yet :)

[acid2002]

I had a job like this and ended up using XFrog it was great.

Derek

[acid2002]

Here are some roots, a still only movie too big.

Derek

[Creature]

Until 1.2 is available for Mac I don't think it should be a huge problem using the old 1.1. You won't get the option of displaying the original spline but other than that 1.2 and 1.1 are rather similar.

[Darter]

Yet another option is the SubSpline expression in Maxon's R9.52 Add Ons (http://www.maxon.net/pages/download/stuff_e.html) Content Browser library.

Load the SubSpline example scene. On the Sweep NURBS, set End Scale to zero. On the SubSpline, set Start Position to zero, check Keep Length and animate the Length parameter.

This often-forgotten library has a wealth of expressions, materials, lighting presets, TP presets etc.

[::eisbaer::]

How can I get the end to taper to a point at all times during the growth?



There is also a way solving this problem with mograph.
you can draw a spline, create a polyobj with some point, link it on the spline and use tracer from mograph. then you can use this trace like a growing spline.

look at my attachment

[Troyan]

Yet another option is the SubSpline expression in Maxon's R9.52 Add Ons (http://www.maxon.net/pages/download/stuff_e.html) Content Browser library.

Load the SubSpline example scene. On the Sweep NURBS, set End Scale to zero. On the SubSpline, set Start Position to zero, check Keep Length and animate the Length parameter.

This often-forgotten library has a wealth of expressions, materials, lighting presets, TP presets etc.

That does work slick. I would animate the radius of the circle spline to make the vine trunk thicken as it grows.

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