Cineversity

I am using an inheritance deformer moving along a spline to create a traveling wave along the side of a 2D plane. although I can achieve the wave, the animation is far from perfect. The wave amplitude is jumping up and down. I tried with the squash and stretch deformer as well but the results where worse.
How can I make this wave perform better. Perhaps using an other method? Point animation is a bit time consuming and I need to be able to easy change the parameters.

Hi Geertjan,

Sorry for the delay in answering, I had a few days off, and if I don’t take those, I get maybe exactly the effect in my body that the project has to visualize.

Thanks for asking for an alternative. I would suggest to go just with the Plain Effector, and use “points” in the Deformer part of it.

Deformer Tab: Polygons are kind of tricky, as they are based on points, and so things might add up in certain cases.

The underlaying polygon is relatively rough and the Subdivision Surface can’t smooth out this for an animation that you like to have.

I have placed the Plain Effector as “sibling” to the SubDivision Surface, so it works on the finer mesh. Please adjust the Falloff to get an even smoother result. Falloff to 100% for example.

Please let me know, if it is not too late at all, if you like to explore other options. I’m back and and happy to dive into it.

My best wishes

Hi Sassi,
If anyone deserves a break once in a while it is you:-). And no it is not too late in fact the client didn’t even notice the bumps in the wave. What I didn’t realize was the fact that the deformer placed ‘under’ the object is not able to use the subdivision surface placed above the object. Together with the plain effector the results are far better.
What I would love to achieve is an asymmetric wave form where the front is steep and the back is more shallow. I could only create it with point animation but as said that far too laborious.
This is only one little part of an animation that explains the chain of events during the swallowing go food.

Excellent, Geertjan, that we have the time to refine it. Thanks for the quick reply and the nice feedback.

This would be a simple set up, perhaps not as elegant as it could be, but with three Plain Effectors, the animation might get some naturalistic feel, maybe not, have a look.

If I got the idea correctly, the peristaltic (muscle movement for the transport) needs to have a this asymmetrically shape of your sketch. However, I assume that the left side is being affected here and not the right side. Which makes it a little bit more complex to limit the influence. To overcome this, I have introduce three Plain Effectors, to “shape” the wave accordingly. Perhaps you have some more adjustments—to make it look better.
I did this with the Falloff size and offset, in this way the “Align to Spline” of each can be selected at once (all three) and animated as it would be one. Further more, the composited wave has now an easy adjustment, for the start, the middle and the end, as I guess that the change around the inflammation might be different then the rest, of it is only local. Just some ideas to illustrate my thoughts.

Let me know if I went into the wrong direction, I will try to find a different approach then.

All the best

The next idea, is pretty much the basic version of a weighted animation/deformation.

I found two points in the mesh that where on top of each other, left lower corner. In the file below it is fixed. [Weld]

I use here the spline option of the falloff, with the weight/constrain I deform only the parts I like to.

The strength of the Plain Effector is animated [start/end]

Perhaps I will add later another option, but I need to test this carefully. :o)

Perhaps with more options to detail it later, but also more tricky to set up eventually.

The Correction Deformer, with Falloff as above.

I selected the front row of points with the Path Selection, which was pretty simple.

My best wishes.

Ha Sassi

Wouw, I tried the spine falloff in the plain deformer to get the right wave shape. But I did apparently something wrong because I couldn’t get it to work. Using the correction deformer, which a never use before, in combination with the spline falloff is also a perfect solution. I fact all you solutions are suitable.
I have the ability to change the waveform very easy which is important because this animation eventually needs to be anatomically correct.

And thanks for removing the double point’s. What I did was importing the drawings form illustrator and turn the splines into a Ngon. I then used the knife tool to create the polygons.

Again you helped me out with a problem I spend hours on;-)

Do you think that I can use this wave as a rigid object to push something forward? I tried it but abandoned it for the same reason that I couldn’t get it to work:-(

Hi Geertjan,

Thanks for the file. As your visualization will be 2D, you might entertain the idea to leave the object as it is, and place a second object for the wave. Since it will have the same color it should look like as one object. This will be in the attached file. It is a very rough sketch!, just to illustrate the idea and show perhaps the side-effects.

I hope I got the question correctly with the rigid object. Please check the other scene file, if that fits. The key here is to have for the “collider’ object the “Moving Mesh” option enabled, in that way the mesh will be updated in detail over time. [Dynamic Body Tag>Attribute Manager>Collision>Shape>Moving Mesh]

My best wishes for the project

Thanks again Sassi.
I’ll continue to experiment:-)

You’re welcome, Geertjan.

I might share more options than you need, but my hope is also that you find among these the one that works best for you.

Let me know if there is anything else, I’m happy to look into it

My best wishes