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View Full Version : How to control a Extrude NURBS with xpresso?

Indeed
10-31-2009, 04:51 AM
Hey there, I have a situation where I have a world map, imported as a vector, and then each country extruded with an extrude nurb. This is all then thrown into a spherical wrap deformer, to make it a 3D globe. I want to be able to dynamicly control the height of the extrusion of each country, so some can raise and lower.

Is there a way in xpresso to do this? Like, some way to have a sphere with falloff drive the extrusion heights? Or a better way?
LucentDreams
10-31-2009, 06:23 AM
Might be possible with a weight effector object (found in the character menu) serving as your falloff, but I don't see how your setup is working at all right now if you are spherical wrapping the extrusions then they won't be able to extrude in any useful way because the whole extruded shape is spherically wrapped and so it just spreads instead of growing outwards.

Instead a wrap with an extrude deformer and plain effector (all in MoGraph) is probably your best bet
Lex1968
10-31-2009, 01:42 PM
Instead a wrap with an extrude deformer and plain effector (all in MoGraph) is probably your best bet

Simply beautiful setup...
Indeed
10-31-2009, 04:26 PM
Wow, Kai this is fantastic. I will be playing around with this a lot!

The only potential problem I see is that I need to individual countries to extrude as a whole. It seems like the extrude deformer is going to individually extrude each polygon, and the countries need to be rather heavily tessellated in order to be smooth around the sphere. Hmmm. Working on it!

Thank you VERY much!
Spekulatius
11-02-2009, 02:48 PM
Wow, Kai this is fantastic. I will be playing around with this a lot!

The only potential problem I see is that I need to individual countries to extrude as a whole. It seems like the extrude deformer is going to individually extrude each polygon, and the countries need to be rather heavily tessellated in order to be smooth around the sphere. Hmmm. Working on it!

Thank you VERY much!

Of course you can control the extrusion of many extrude-nurbs via xpresso – the hierarchy-iterator can do this.
But I think you´ll need an extrude-nurbs for every country.
The only problem is to decide how much every county will be extruded, but this can also be solved in xpresso, for example if you use the global position of every single spline.
My solution file only uses some countries of the world, but you can do it also with a world map.
The falloff-null is the object that moves over the (original, not deformed!) landscape and sets the extrusion. I´ve added some noise to make it look nicer.

Jochen


....I just saw that in my file the frequency of the noise (null "Map">userdata:Frequency) is 0, so in this case there´s no time-depending noise in this file unless you set a frequency.
Indeed
11-02-2009, 03:54 PM
Jochen! You are amazing. That you very VERY much for this scene file! Wonderful learning resource. It looks perfect! I'll be spending all day figuring this out :)
ondertenonder
11-02-2009, 05:05 PM
that's an interesting file.
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