hi

I'm trying to displace a grid with an object that's traveling through it.
I think the ray sop kind of works but it's quite harsh. Is there a way to get more blending to the edge of the grid so it smoothly goes from 0-1 displace? Controlling the amount and falloff would be perfect. Is there already a sop for this?

I did look at the magnet but my object is a polys. I also looked at displace vop but I suppose i need a texture map rather than my animated geo in the scene.

tia

Two ideas off the top of my head that may or may not work

- Use Smooth SOP on the grid to smooth out the results

- Copy metaballs to your points and use that with the Magnet SOP

Hello, thank you for reply.

I tried both methods and doesn't look like
It does what I am looking for.

I ended up doing a cloth sim and it works w a little
Post sim work. Cloth sim very slow though but it works.
Thanks

Hey, on the ray sop, you should be able to control the amount of falloff using the “Scale” parameter. You can also create an attribute (i.e. ray_falloff) beforehand, and paint it to represent your falloff as desired (you can probably even setup an expression based off the centroid). then use the attribute variable in the scale attribute (i.e. $RAY_FALLOFF)

Hope that helps!

hi there i did try that, however it looks like that piping that “ray_falloff” attribute to the scale parameter only affects the collision area. Scale appears to only affect Y axis on the collision.

Say we have a sphere at the center of the grid, i was looking for a a smooth and controllable displacement from the sphere to the edge of the grid. Sorry for not being clear. I'll post a hip of my attempts when I get home.

Cloth sim kinda does this but is quite slow and does blow up on me sometime

thank you

ah… on that note, is your ray sop set to project rays, or minimun distance? This makes sense as if you are using the project rays mode, it will use the grid normals as the rays.

Now one thing to note is that if you want the grid to smoothly falloff thorugh the sphere as it goes through, you would need that ray_falloff attribute to be generated based on the position of the sphere. Try this;

-create the attribute on the sphere instead of the grid.
-use attribTransfer to transfer it back to the grid based on the sphere position
-do a little processing on the attribute if needed (i.e. smooth it using a smooth SOP, or sharpen it using a power function with a point sop, etc.)
-then wire a ray sop using the ray_falloff attribute

(sorry I cannot post anything… my vid card just died and I am out of office )