Cineversity

I’m building an animation in which some strands of curly hair go straight in an almost microscopic view.

My plan is to spline wrap my hair model to a helix and animate the start and end radius to turn the coil into a straight hair, then clone that 10-20 times to create additional hairs.

The problem I’m having is that when I drop these spline-deformed hairs under a Cloner they don’t end up where I think they should be.  They’re offset a few centimeters from their correct positions.  In my setup I’m using a Cloner that uses a plane to place the clones.  The Object mode is set to Surface with 20 clones specified.  I can see little dots on the plane where the clones SHOULD be, but the actual spiraled clones are offset a bit from those dots.  I could just slide everything over to compensate, but I want to know why they’re being offset.  Everything is positioned at 0,0,0. 

I get similar results when the Cloner is set to Linear or Grid Array: the resulting clones are offset from where they should be.

Or is there a better way to do this?

I’ve attached a simplified demo of this scene.  It shows the offset hair objects under one cloner and an identical cloner using cubes which ARE in the correct positions on the plane.

Thanks.

Shawn Marshall
Marshall Arts Motion Graphics

Hi Shawn,

Have a look at the attached file.

https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share?s=gYQEH3t3S88kfhsDeWMbS4

It works now as expected. In the moment I clone the Helix each time as well, the change of position doesn’t matter anymore. Before the “Spline Wrap” took the Helix always from the same position, but was moved itself many times, it looks like that moved everything. At least that is how I understand it; Following this thought delivered the scene I have attached.
(Set Object Cloner>Transform>R.P to -90º)

The simplest way to find that, was to set the strength of the “Spline Warp” to zero. (To be honest, my first thought was that the bounding box was initially set large and perhaps stored, but that wasn’t the case. I share that as most problems otherwise with the “Spline Wrap” were based on that on the past, since some releases this has much improved.)

All the best

Sassi

Thanks again for the quick reply.  This approach makes sense.  Not sure why I didn’t try having my Helix spline in with the cloner.

Cheers.

Shawn

You’re welcome, Shawn.

Yes, it isn’t pretty clear if the Helix information would be used in a Cloner Object one or the other way.

Anyway, I try always to follow the information, where can something miss or distort the needed data. THis helps me most of the time.

Have a great weekend

Sassi