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Ah yes, I understand the physics, but not Bryce ;)
Jay
"What's up Duck?"
Here’s another ripple animation (YouTube Link ~ 12 secs long) experiment – this time wake-like ripples.
A flat metaball (a normal metaball made huge, and then squished in the vertical y-direction) replaces the water-plain, and an ungrouped ‘set’ of metaballs aligned in a wake-like formation, parented to a torus (essentially, Oroboros’s stup). The flattened metaball doesn’t produce seams, so it’s a much better arrangement than using just toruses (see above). It's quite possible to animate the flattened metaball into a moving water scene - just like you would normally produce moving water (see Steve-L's tutorial of this Forum)...etc.
Don’t have software to record onscreen activity, but the second image below should give you an idea of the setup. Can’t recall website from which the duck came (long time ago), but it was free.
Jay
Animation looks really good!
Hahaha! That's great, Jama :D
Question: Why a torus for the parent in this model?
In my setup, I use a torus as a scaffold because it looks similar to the shape I'm trying to emulate. But I could have equally used any other object for parenting. All that's required for the metaballs is an object to parent, and then hide the parent. (I often use stones as parents, because I rarely use them in my models: it means I can go to the 'stone' selection palette and find all my controlling objects in one menu.)
Many thnaks, Horo...just playing around with it really.
Oroboros - Why a torus for the parent in this model? - I've never used parenting before, so this was a first try. However, I used the toruses as they allowed control over the general outwards exapnsion of the ripple-metaball sets, and for further adjustment when configuring the circular toruses into 'elliptical' toruses (confusing?) - using their long axes...etc.
The 'parenting/family' thing is certainly a great method, and will use this from now on. Normally, I would have just grouped objects according to needs, however, this method allows additional control, and effects, too. Did I mention I don't understand Bryce? ;)
In between other projects at the moment, but also playing around with some metaball-animations (simple 5-sec-long ani's) - they really are a funny object when in motion. Will post a final ani' in the near future.
Jay
Aha, I see... Kinda.
But just a little heads-up: for both of our ripple animations, the shape of the parent is completely irrelevant. The only thing the parented metaballs are reacting to is the scale of the parent from its origin. If you'd changed the torus for a sphere, cube, another metaball or even a tree, the metaballs would follow the scale of the parent, whether you scaled it evenly on all axes or just stretched one of them.
Also, the parent can be any initial size. If you know the parent must increase in size, it's often a good move to shrink it down before it becomes a parent.
Finally... Parenting's magic :) Automatically, parent-child objects react like they're grouped, because you have 4 properties sent by the parent to its children. But you can create some pretty interesting machines by deselecting 1-to-3 of the 4 default properties propagated by the parent: Distance, Rotation, Offset, Size. So unless I need to group for Boolean operations, parenting offers far more exciting options.
Ah, see what you mean now, Oro. Just tied (parented) a similar, seperate object to a torus, a square and a stone. As I scale-up each parent, each changes differently according to the initial dimension of the parent (that’s very powerful, and very useful in more complex setups, I would guess - let alone, the additional advantage of changing their individual attributes even more beforehand.).
Ah, but what about ‘time’ - the parents' fourth dimension in space as I animate them...hahaaa...(don’t answer - Bullit's cute ‘Einy’ got me going down the 'classical' route ;) ).
Jay
I know I'm not meant to answer. So I'll just say there is one :)
Just a few Bryce, five-seconds-long metaball animations combined in a single animation for fun (YouTube link ~ 3.20 mins ).
A discovery (always nice when unexpected) was made, too – that metaballs aligned in a certain configuration can create isolated metaballs from themselves (I’ve called them ‘anti-metaballs’ (AMs)) - the below image is a snapshot of one in the animation.
Now if we could just create these AMs in reality, they might solve our energy crisis, or, answer the whole ‘Dark Matter’ problem...hahaaa ;)
Jay
Great animation!
Cheers, Horo. These metaball thingies seem to have caught the imagination of others, as when initially posting to YouTube, quite a few have made some Bryceis about them. I think metaballs are more suited in an animated context than just modelling...but then, I'm an animator, so defintely biased ;)
Jay
Nice sequences, Jama :) Another animator has caught the metaball virus :)
I particularly liked the gas expulsion on the gun fire - nice touch.
I'm still rendering out demos for this material animation demo coming out. Stupid reflectivity, slowing down my renders....
@Jay: Those are really good. Love your choice of sound for each one.
Cheers, Oroboros. Wasn’t sure about whether the sound comes from the ignition of the gunpowder in the bullet itself, or the escape of compressed air. If the former, then the sound should be heard before the smoke appears, the latter at the same time. I’m not sure exactly, but I think the sound physics depends on the weapon used, however, went with the gas setup in the end, as the timing sort of worked. BTW, looking forward to the material tutorial, and understand the slow render stuff (the meta-lights anis., though only five seconds long, took over 15 hours to render for each...sigh).
Guss...yeah, I found that SoundBible site a year ago, and have been using it ever since (here’s another site that offers free sounds, too). I don’t know how these 'sounders' (and modellers, come to speak of them) can be so nice to offer all them free, but much appreciated from this sector, anyway.
Jay
Wow Jay the animation is awesome