I've working on these animated curves as you can see in the attached file. I have used $LIFE in the ‘Polywire_Working’ node to control the thickness of the wire as a result of the age of the curve, so that the wire is thin to begin with and grows thicker as it gets older. The problem is that I cannot seem to stop this growth and the wire just gets progressively thicker as it continues to grow.

I had thought that maybe an if() statement could be used, but I've tried this and the node won't work (Polywire_Nonworking) (this could be due to my syntax, i'm not great at using expressions).

If anyone could have a look at this file and suggest a method for fixing this I would really appreciate it.

Thanks,
Gary

you can limit your life
for example if you want it to grow until life = 0.1 and hold it's thickness you can use min(a,b) function
it will return minimum of a,b values
e.g.:

0.5*min($LIFE, 0.1)

it will basically clamp $LIFE value so it will not be higher than 0.1

That was exactly what I was looking for. Thanks Tamte :-)

Wow this thread is really old as it turns out, sorry for reviving it maybe, but I am trying to copy your setup @ponge using H16.5 and at first I was very confused until I realised that literally everything has changed in the way popnet etc works now, so im a little lost again haha

I can't seem to add a creep inside a popnet now and the force you used doesn't exist either anymore. I can open your file and it all works but I can recreate the nodes it seems.