how does messiah suck? - the leech project

#1

As many of you may know, I’m not much of a TD. Nonetheless, I’ve created a working rig for a leech using flexmotion (though flex would probably have sufficed) and I’d be interested to see what others think of it.
Here’s the object / scene as an mpj: link

I’d love to see other ideas or approaches. Also comment to the structure - ie. the animate group, etc.

Also - spherize (for sucking blood) has a wierd kind of rolling motion when I move it along the curve. It kind of works for this creature but wasn’t what I was expecting. Anyone have tips about that? I tried putting it before other effects, but no go. It would be good to know how to get smooth spherize gulps…

#2

If you show the wires of your leech as you move the “sphere_pos” slider you can see that each odd motion correlates perfectly with a ring of geometry. Spherize just pushes points out from the middle of the Spherize effect add so when you don’t have enough points there are patches that don’t get pushed out as far as those near the points. So subdividing would be a simple fix.

#3

ANOTHER thing you could do. . . is replace your Spherize with a MetaEffector and tie that into your material’s bump. Turning on displace will create a perfectly smooth bulge. I just turned off your Spherize, parented the effector to it and . . . well let me just make a screen shot.

Probably doesn’t help you much if your wanting to render in LW but. . . it kind of shows off the power of the integrated renderer.

#4

Talk about brain farts… I noticed that with the polys and spent about 40 minutes looking for ways to place the subdivision process before the spherize effect. If effects like spherize don’t take subdivision into account first, then make the ability to to determine this manually a request.

Anyhoo, thanks for the great tips, Billy!

#5

yea that would probably solve a lot of issues. Make metanurbs an effect. But then could you control it with effectors etc? hmm Probably not. Its hard to know where it belongs. :-/

#6

probably wouldn’t hold up to conversion in LW or other packages, anyway. The subdiv order gets applied there. So… subdivide I will!

(Well, not so much for this project, as I kind of like that rolling swallow :wink: )

#7

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