alternative to flow path object

#1

any ideas for alternative. doing some spiraling ‘sea dragons’ and getting squashy deformations and loss of volume from the lattice

#2

You need to generate your surfaces procedurally. Create a curve and extrude another curve (maybe a circle) along the first curve, keeping history. Alternatively, start with several base curves and loft between them. Either way you end up with a simple surface that you would then use as a wrap deformer for your detailed sea-dragon mesh. Then deform the base curve(s). Its probably not going to be quite as simple as those 3 steps, but it is a good strategy.

David

#3

didnt think of that…will try that out asap…thanks

#4

Wow, kind of a custom lattice. Great idea.

#5

another good solution to this…the best maybe…was provided to me by peter shipkov on the soup-dev.com website.

i add it here for posterity

process:

  1. create curve and a simple ik spline which you can move over the curve using the offset parameter of splineIk

2 . create a cMuscle spine…Muscle/Bonus Rigging/Create Muscle Spline and turn off constrain mid controls.

  1. skin your character to this rig using joints inside grpSplineDRIVEN

  2. then constrain all the controlers with names like grpIControlSpline1Cons to the relevant joints on your manually created ikspline

  3. your character now slides around a curve with the advantage that you have a cool muscleSpline to add deformation/acting on top of the manual splineIK

  4. you sometimes get misrotated muscleSpline controllers. rotate them manually into position then use update parameter inside each constraint.

this is the most flexible solution i found during the last week and thanks shipkov for saving my ass and providing example scene

find the example file on this thread

http://soup-dev.websitetoolbox.com/post?id=6186615

cheers

#6

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