I wonder if it is possible to make a polygon object growing with its edges? e.g. a growing building or a growing character, using its edges. Just like L-system but it follow the model's edges.
Glad to hear any ideas.
C.
Growing Wires ?
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- liu_0083
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- goldfarb
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- old_school
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Yes you can grow stuff along edges. This can get complicated though.
A building for example may/will have vertical edges spanning the floor to floor distance all along the faces with some edges intersected by windows. How you handle this and other specific cases can get real tricky where you have to divide up the percentage growth intelligently instead of doing a novice general scale on everything. I personally dislike when VFX artists do the “novice” approach with cheers of “looks good enough” from the masses. :evil:
Obviously the best way is to literally construct the building or character procedurally,extruding it bit by bit and sewing things together. It is relatively easy to control how things get put together. I have seen everything from cool SOP approaches either using lsystems or not to particles to grow objects and everything inbetween.
This is what I call “The Houdini Way”.
If you have to take a pre-build building and grow by edges, it will still take some work to identify those faces you want to grow, put them in a group, create your own vector to determine the growth direction where the amplitude of the vector could represent the relative amount of scale and a pivot position attribute to be the centre of the scale. Liberated from edges too means more control! It then is easy to use the Primitive SOP to do the scaling for you. Now if you are dealing with quad polygons all oriented the same way (hopefull at best, most say yes but rarely encountered), the job gets a lot easier. A character? ‘Faget ’abat it. With polys spinning each way, if you can identify a primary axis flowing along the different parts then you can still kind of do it. Use curves to define the direction? I'm sure there are other ways as well but this is the first that came to mind.
This is what I call “The BAss ackwards Way”.
A building for example may/will have vertical edges spanning the floor to floor distance all along the faces with some edges intersected by windows. How you handle this and other specific cases can get real tricky where you have to divide up the percentage growth intelligently instead of doing a novice general scale on everything. I personally dislike when VFX artists do the “novice” approach with cheers of “looks good enough” from the masses. :evil:
Obviously the best way is to literally construct the building or character procedurally,extruding it bit by bit and sewing things together. It is relatively easy to control how things get put together. I have seen everything from cool SOP approaches either using lsystems or not to particles to grow objects and everything inbetween.
This is what I call “The Houdini Way”.
If you have to take a pre-build building and grow by edges, it will still take some work to identify those faces you want to grow, put them in a group, create your own vector to determine the growth direction where the amplitude of the vector could represent the relative amount of scale and a pivot position attribute to be the centre of the scale. Liberated from edges too means more control! It then is easy to use the Primitive SOP to do the scaling for you. Now if you are dealing with quad polygons all oriented the same way (hopefull at best, most say yes but rarely encountered), the job gets a lot easier. A character? ‘Faget ’abat it. With polys spinning each way, if you can identify a primary axis flowing along the different parts then you can still kind of do it. Use curves to define the direction? I'm sure there are other ways as well but this is the first that came to mind.
This is what I call “The BAss ackwards Way”.
There's at least one school like the old school!
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