Cineversity

I am trying to figure out a way to force a softbody into another shape after a certain period of time.

I have a sphere, I drop it onto a collider body. Once it settles a bit, I’d like to it melt/relax into a specified shape. I’ve tried using a pose morph tag but it doesn’t seem to work.

Any ideas?

Hi ncorrao,

You could mix the two, two means the dynamic and the final state, into a third one. Each must have the same point structure and amount.

I would Point-Cache the Dynamic, which seems to be more stable for such work than using the dynamic cache.

The idea is simple, we iterate through all points and get the position from each. This is fed into an Xpresso> Calculate> Mix (vector)

Please have a look here:
https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share/ciepo4chzYbVwzHjP0zW92vx1MTfMiSxFaRMN2xBK8h

If there are any further questions about this setup, I’m happy to look into it.

Cheers

Perfect! Thank you!

An aside - I am relatively new to Cinema but have used Bifrost in Maya a bit (built by the ICE team from Softimage) and I was hoping I could dig into points like this. Wonderful!

Thank you very much for your reply, ncorrao!

If this kind of thinking is familiar to you, I guess you will get quickly used to Xpresso.

ENJOY

P.S.:

Perhaps this might be interesting to use:
https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share/F0EGEA7sYkKEaG1RE2k06ssWHHqZIOT96V85LpBVLKe

Same set up, but instead of a Mix slider, I used here an
Xpresso> MoGraph>Falloff
node, with a Spherical Field to drive the change.

The Falloff is based on the Field-objects, which can be combined in the falloff list like Photoshop layers. The points get the value of the field[s], and based on that, it will have an individual mix value. Again each point individually!

While adding a Delay Effector (set to Deform: Points, and Spring) to it, the SoftBody aesthetic is not interrupted.
https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share/wJE6ewgBljyYNH6A0WKVrT7NHgd7wSoRJPQxgk1OyD0

This is brilliant! The UX for fields/mograph is such a joy to use compared to some other packages..

Now I am trying to set this up so that once the softbody source enters the field, that would drive the mixer. I think I can figure out how to just use the world position of the source1 object (simulated object) to drive the field’s position, but that feels a little hacky. I have also tried making the field a child of the simulated source but of course it slides around a bit (I suppose I could key off the simulation at some desirable point and that might be fine too).

Thank you again for the input on this - it really got me unstuck on a project.

Hi ncorrao,

The Field’s position is given where you place the field, e.g., the Sphere Field in the scene. That can be done outside of Xpresso.

The position you feed in from each point of the mesh (via Iteration and point node) will then “have a look” what falloff value is given for that specific point.

example:
https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share/7027Q44K7fQYcMiy6hNLBJGu6ofFyyiLyR6YaelQHQV

I hope that makes sense. The Field can be completely independent of anything.

All the best