Cineversity

Hi Cineversity Friends,
  I am partially through the process of modeling a flying butterfly. The movement of the wings is being driven by the vibrate tag and a texture resembling that of butterfly wings has been applied as a flat projection to the modeled wings. This all works correctly and in any position of the wing the projection appears correctly.
  However, I added a Jiggle Deformer to each wing to put some “flex” into the wing movement to add realism. This flex really helped, however - it created a problem: depending on the position of the wing, the texture sometimes does not stretch and cover the wing as it should. I tried adding a Stick Texture tag, but it didn’t seem to resolve the problem.
  The wings were created using a wing shaped spline and extrude nurbs. I tried making the wings editable and applying the Stick Texture tag. I also tried “connect & delete” and then applying the Texture Tag. None of these attempts resolved the problem.
  Obviously, seeing the project file would be helpful. Therefore, I zipped it and attempted to attach it. However, I received a message stating, “The file you are attempting to upload has invalid content for its MIME type”.
  Help with either of these issues would be appreciated!

  Thanks in Advance,
  Larry

Hi Larry,

You might like to check with the support, but I fear they can’t tell you anything differently.

In the scene you have applied the texture as flat. Works fine while the wing is static. Flat means here a linear projection with the pixels of the texture projected in a parallel way. Then the Spline changes its shape and the Extrude follows with a kind of bend shape. But the Extrude Object hasn’t moved, nor has the Extrude object. The texture is applied to a Null object and there is the projection direction stored. So the “bended” wind moves through the projection and it appears as a moving texture. But in fact the projection of the texture is very stable, in its projection, so the wing moves “inside” of it.

Flat is here not an option, but UV(W) is neither, as the “caps” of the Extrude object does not have UV data at all. (Ask the support…)

The only way I can suggest is to make the wing editable, then (Jiggle is off) set the texture as before (flat). If there is a UV tag, to make it simple, delete this one. Select the object and the texture tag (both on the same line in the Object Manager), and go to Object Manager>Tags>Generate UVW Coordinates. Now switch the Jiggle back on and the result should be very similar to the movement before.

The “make editable” process needs an “Optimize” process to connect really all points. Which might result in a need to adjust the Phong angle. I would as well suggest to “cache” the Jiggle, so you can see the result even on a per frame base and very slowly.

All the best

Sassi

Prepared object marked via Layer-chip.
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Hi Dr. Sassi,
  Thank-you so much!! I didn’t realize that you had successfully received my attached files because I had received the message staging, “The file you are attempting to upload has invalid content for its MIME type”. I’m so glad that the files did upload properly so that you were able to clearly see my texturing challenge.
  As an experiment, I tried some minor variations of your instructions - and none of them worked. I see that this procedure must be very exact for the texture to adhere properly.
  I don’t think I could have figured this out on my own - which really demonstrates the value of Cineversity. Thank-you for taking the time to assist me in resolving this issue!

  Warm Regards,
  Larry

Hey Larry,

Thanks for the feedback, very much appreciated. Yes, I did not responded to the Mime type, I though it had worked (finally) for you. :o) As a rule of thumb, zip files should work up to 4MB (total per post) and images with max 800x600 pixels.

I’m glad I was able to help, and I wish your project tons of success.

Have a great day

Sassi