Flubber-like animation, how to rig for it?

#1

Hey!

I’ve been tasked to create a “character” of sorts. Basically it’s an ambulating piece of jello, like the Gelatinous Cube of D&D fame.

But I am at a loss as to how to set this up. It needs to be able to send jelly articulated tendrils out from it’s surface but otherwise needs to be a nicely shaped, unbroken jelly surface, and the tendrils need to be smoothly tessellated as well. What I need is a surface that retessellates itself based on spatial area, like an nParticle system turned to mesh. How should I go about doing this? :expressionless:

On a tangential note, to make this jelly thing looks as good as possible, I would like to to not be completely and evenly see-through. As in, the further inside it you look/the deeper the actual volume is from your point of view, the darker and more blurred the refractions will be. With the current shader I’ve set up, it looks alright, but the refractions are equally blurred over the entire object, no matter the depth, and it makes it look… I dunno… Static, dead.

#2

i havent tried this but i was thinking about it and what id try to do is animate the cube with plenty of subdivisions and use an object inside with some kind of shrink wrap to create the deformations…maybe a sculpt deformer using geometry or a plugin. after i had the animation more or less where i wanted it id convert it to nCloth with input mesh attract painted where i wanted it to follow the underlying animation.

dunno if it would work…but something to try maybe.

#3

try stretch mesh from kickstand labs

#4

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