Cineversity

I am making a blood vessel network and need to create specific branches off a main trunk that can be easily manipulated/animated. I have some experience with sweep and spline wrap for single splines - but how to make branches?

What I have learned so far is that MoSpline can do this (i.e. turtle mode, Rick Barret and Chris Schmidt’s tree—all from a while ago), but I want to be sure it’s the best R20 option before investing a lot of effort on learning the R12 or R15 ground rules, only to find at the end there’s a magic button in R20 that does it all automatically. A pointer to the right functionality would be much appreciated.

Not trying to skip the hard work, just want to ensure that after the hard work I don’t wind up in a dead end.

That never happens, of course.

Hi mford610,

I love to do it natively, as I would see an option here:
https://www.cineversity.com/vidplaytut/growing_structures_branches_and_veins_introduction

But quite frankly, this plugin promises to do it:
https://nitro4d.com/product/nitroveins/

Besides, X-Particles has some functionality of that kind
https://insydium.ltd/support/video-manuals/x-particles-video-manual/generators/xpsplinemesher/
Whereby the particles, like in Thinking Particles, can split from one into two, etc. Then use Tracer.
The Sweep Object has no functionality to merge those y connections properly, that would need the Volume Builder/Mesher, as mentioned in the first link.

My best wishes

Fantastic! Never fails - if you think you’ve hit a wall, don’t worry. Cinema has a button for that.

Very cool - I prefer the native approach as well, and as the Nose points out, the animator should always be in control of the model, not the other way around (which sometimes happens with plugins). What you save in getting started quickly usually comes back to bite you when the client wants to change something just before final render.

Hi mford610,

Yes, as I mentioned it before, never replace knowledge with a plugin. There are a lot of great plugins available, and they allow for beautiful results, no question.
However: Like you mentioned, and as it is my idea about, never replace knowledge with something you can’t control, just to be more comfortable.

I hope you can achieve the aesthetic you are after, and Noseman’s series is undoubtedly a great source.

Thanks for the feedback!

ENJOY