Hi there,
I'm trying to use an animated character to deform another object which is based the same character voxellized (a-la' minecraft).
To do so I am copying metaballs on the points of the original hi-poly character and use the metball capture and metaball deform to deform the cubic version.
The result is fine and exactly what I wanted, the problem is that the entire setup is unbelievably slow and often crashes on me.
Am I doing something wrong? Or maybe there's a more efficient way to do so?

Thanks in advance
Leon

EDIT: Added only the first 12 frames of animation or the attachment would be too big.

first of all, your right input of copy is time dependent, so every frame points from volume and copy sop need to be recomputed, you may want to freeze that on first frame

instead of metaball capture, you can use Cloth Capture and Cloth Deform
you will need to wait initially for capture but deform should be faster
look at the file

if you want even faster feedback, you can have a look at this thread
http://forums.odforce.net/index.php?/topic/8722-pmvc-positive-mean-value-coordinates/ [forums.odforce.net]
you will find very nice tool in there

you can as well append Clean SOP right after your fuse1 and check Fix Overlaps, that should get rid of all internal faces (since they are all double faces) and you will get much lighter geometry

Thanks guys, that was really helpful. I tried using the clothdeform when I didn't exactly know how its inputs worked and the help wasn't that clear.

Now I am running into another small issue:
I've tried using this process on a non-fused version (copying cubes on the points) to make them crumble afterwards via RBD. The problem is that this way the processing happens on a lots of points, with the original geometry being quite heavy (6000+ points). I've tried polyreducing / fusing it to make it lighter, but for some reason (because I am reading an extrnal /bgeo file?) The reduced version changes every frame.
Is there a way to keep the number of ponts / primitive constant during the animation?
Of course the cloth deform doesn't work if the number of primitives changes every frame.
Or, if you have a better idea on how to do this, I am all ears.

Thanks again for the help, guys.

Nevermind guys, I seem to have found a fix.

The cloth deform nodes does create a tons of attributes for weighing, but if I source the geometry for deformation only once with a timeshift node and then delete the cloth attributes afterwards with an attribute node and a wildcard, the shape is still retained and I get back my reasonable simulation times.

Thanks for your help!

Hi guys, the development of this effect has been flowing smoothly but now I've run into an unexpected problem. If I activate the clothdeform starting from a frame where, for an unlucky combination of cube's size and timing, two cube's edge overlap, the two edges are considered “as one” and this nasty deformation occurs. Does anyone have an idea on how to fix this?
I've tried using the aforementioned clean node, but none of the options on the node seem to fex this issue.



Thanks in advance and for the previous help
Leon